creation
by cloudycats
Summary: Giratina is an elder god. The hunter is not. Together, they fight metaphysical injustices! Something like that.
1. Giratina I

_credit goes to a Bloodborne/Dishonored crossover on AO3 called_ Moon and Tide _for this fic's inspiration._

 _the Bloodborne ending used is Honoring Wishes, not Childhood's Beginning. for clarification: Honoring Wishes is the one with only one final boss after the wet nurse._

* * *

To those few who know of its existence, the distorted, fractured domain of Giratina is the Reverse World. It represents possibility, the good and the bad and the neutral: all that the true world it reflects could be if physical laws held less sway, if the day-to-day living of pokémon and humans impacted the planet to their full extent. When a magcargo's skin heats to a temperature that should boil the air for dozens of meters, it's the Reverse World that shepherds away the brunt of the devastation. When a human captures Celebi and makes an incoherent eddy of time, it's the Reverse World that calms the ripples.

One wouldn't be wrong in believing that. But if the Reverse World was nothing more than a crutch for the true world to break its stumbles on, Giratina could never stand on equal footing with its siblings, the dragons of space and time. As just another dimension that borders the one that hosts the largest concentration of pokémon life, Palkia might as well claim dominion over it and render Giratina redundant.

The first incorrect belief, and the one from which all other errors stem, comes across in its names: those who've discovered it assume that the Reverse World is the plane on the wrong side of the mirror.

The Reverse World is the _origin_. From it came space and time and matter and spirit, and so the rest of the universe unfolded in fractals around it. And when the last star fades from the sky, heat and light and gas misting to black, it will be to the Reverse World that the universe returns.

Until that moment comes, Giratina prolongs the inevitable.

Aerodactyl live and die, Regigigas pulls continents apart as easily as a graveler makes a nest from boulders, humans realize increasingly creative ways to keep their settlements intact on a planet where common rodents can call down lightning from the heavens. Giratina steadies a fault line shaken by two onix's passage, repairs the soil trampled and salted in an army's wake, corrects the gravity disrupted in the aftermath of an argument between powerful psychics. With some exceptions, life is a transient thing; the dragon keeps track of its passage only through its patterns.

Some exceptions referring, in this case, to the small creature falling through the air. It's not unusual. Dimensions have their own sort of gravity, and when they move – as they do – they overlap at points. Things come through.

It's a process easily reversed. There are always portals opening and closing between the Distortion World and its reflections. Giratina used to leave the creatures who come through by accident to their own devices, but that was before it discovered that a fall – not the impact, because that's always harmless, but the fall itself – can kill.

It only happens rarely, but there's no clear connection Giratina's found between those who die that way that will let it predict when it will happen. The dragon's simply taken to treating it as a possibility every time.

The unfortunate soul is a fair ways off, a speck of motion against nebulous darkness, but distance is malleable. Giratina curves beneath a brook coursing unsupported between two drifting islands, through the rose window of a cavernous building that in the bordering world is a chapel dedicated to the three lake sprites, and when it comes out the other side of the roof the creature is falling directly above it.

It's an enterprising thing. As it passes an island, a bulky, segmented blade that extends with the creature's swing scores a gash into the rock. The blade slips free quickly, but before the creature's plummet picks up speed again Giratina snatches it out of the air.

It panics as soon as the dragon's mandibles close around it. Understandable, but irritating; when, in its flailing, the blade scrapes painfully across the crown protecting Giratina's eyes, the dragon drops it without remorse. Giratina swings around, phases through the blade and the scattering of hypersonic projectiles the little creature sends its way, and catches it again from behind, this time maneuvering to pin its arms in.

Giratina retraces its visitor's path, searching for the traces of the portal it came through. Usually the dragon would simply leave it on the nearest solid surface, but this one fell far enough that it likely won't be able to get back to its entry point on its own. Returning to their own worlds near where they left seems to make the experience less disorientating for them.

As they climb, the creature tries to wriggle out of Giratina's hold. The dragon tightens its grip, carefully so as not to fracture any fragile bones, and the creature finally goes limp. Giratina glances at it, not worried, but... well, a little concerned. It doesn't know why things sometimes die in the air, after all. The view's difficult enough at this angle and distance that it can't make out details; the blade and the projectile launcher haven't slipped from the creature's hands, though, so the lack of movement seems to be voluntary.

As they pass through a cloudy fold of space, gravity spins neatly on its axis. The creature startles, and the dragon, reassured, turns its attention away. Its passage disperses the thin haze to reveal clear, fathomless water stretching for miles across below. In other worlds, this is where sea meets sky. The creature can't be from past this place, yet Giratina came across no portals on the way. The dragon slows to a stop near the surface and looks over the scene reflected below, the floating islands and the clouds and the crystal shards that are windows to other planes, searching for what it may have missed.

An arm squeezes free of Giratina's hold. The creature reaches out. Faint ripples spread where the tips of its fingers brush the sea. They pass over the reflection of Giratina, over an eye. The red iris bright as coals waxes large and luminous under the waves, and the thing looking back from the water isn't Giratina at all.

The dragon recoils, jerking the hand away; the instant snaps. The reflection shatters against its scream, a call that's query and threat and declaration of self.

There's no reply. As soon as the sound fades, the sea rushes in to fill the hollow. Giratina looks down at itself, at the creature with its free hand curled into a claw against the dragon's mandible. Giratina's spooked it. Its ribs are expanding and contracting visibly with its breaths.

The dragon flips around, leaving the water behind. It weaves through the branches of a great stone tree; coming out the other side, the sea is gone, and the rising sun tints every cloud a lighter purple and casts a faint glitter over a maze of frosted isles. Giratina lets go over the base of a cliff, and its visitor lands on its feet in a patch of snow that nearly reaches its knees, stumbles a step for balance, and then trips with a crunch of breaking ice.

Giratina hovers while it unsteadily picks itself up. In retrospect, this might not be an ideal climate to have placed it in. It doesn't have any flames or ice or thick fur on its body, some of the common physical traits of fire types and ice types. Still, it likely wouldn't appreciate being relocated again.

It looks up at Giratina. Or turns the dragon's way, in any case – it doesn't have eyes that Giratina can see, just ragged strips of cloth tied around the upper half of its face beneath the head covering. Odd little thing. Where did it come from?

Unfortunately, no matter what form of creature it is, Giratina wouldn't understand it even if it gave a speech elaborating on its origins. There are so many human languages, and they all change so quickly, that it's long since stopped putting in the effort to learn any, and there's a psychic component to pokémon speech that Giratina predates the evolution of.

The creature turns away and takes a few steps to put it out from under Giratina's shadow. There's an odd lurch to its gait unlike in any other bipedal stride Giratina's seen. It doesn't take much deduction to discover why: the footprints it leaves in the snow don't match each other. The left is a sort of oval squished inwards at the middle while the right doesn't seem to have a foot at all, only a thin leg that tapers towards the bottom.

Slowly, it carves a short, straight furrow through the snow with its projectile launcher. Once done, it cocks its head at Giratina for a moment; then, methodically, it clears another line at a slant through the first. Giratina leans over as it makes a third, a fourth.

A fifth line, but even as it begins, before it meets the others, Giratina loses interest. Whatever quality about them roused its curiosity is gone. The creature pauses, then kicks the snow back into shape over it. It starts over from another angle, bringing the line in to meet the others at a different point. Giratina's attention is caught again. A sixth...

In a shift of thought, the dragon understands what it's looking at.

Query and threat and declaration of self. The echo of its own call written in lines in the snow: _creation._


	2. Giratina II

The creature's vocabulary is limited to other beings' words, which raises questions all its own. Giratina makes no move to interrupt, though, as piece by piece, echo by echo, the creature gives as clear an overview as it can of a town by the sea. It explains about the way a species descended from humans fell to conflict after the discovery of a blood that can cure any illness, about the nightly hunts of mortal-borne monsters, about the watcher in the moon who sponsors the hunts.

Aside from a single offhand reference to being human that Giratina attributes to an error resulting from its method of speech, it skirts over mentioning itself. For a human to know these things, to be able to speak even in such a constrained form about them, isn't conceivable. There are days Arceus can't understand its firstborn three, because in learning to socialize with humans and the younger pokémon it must by necessity abandon vast swathes of its own experience; there are aspects of the universe so alien to the current generations that merely possessing knowledge of them makes for an insurmountable communication barrier.

After the last stroke of its choppy description, it trudges back to the first rune and sets about erasing its work. It seems such a tragedy, in that moment, that it has no voice of its own, that it should understand as so few in all the universes do and yet still not know enough to speak. What would the creature's own voice look like? What would its first word be? A few more pushes to bring it to the edge, and perhaps...

It makes a quiet sound in the back of its throat. It writes of a graveyard filled with flowers, lit by the moon's grace and nourished by an oath made in a different lifetime. There is a promise. There is a purpose. There is a home that treasures it and welcomes its return, the creature its companion through the long nights.

...no pushes, then. Giratina dips its head closer to the snow as if a different angle will present some method to misinterpret that final word, but its meaning is quite clear. The clearest, in fact, nothing but deep lines and clean edges, the straight line and the slanted square it bisects.

It turns its eyes to the creature, who straightens under its focus. Giratina didn't notice earlier, but most of its weight has shifted onto its projectile launcher and left leg, the one with a foot, since it touched ground. Favoring an injury. Life tends towards symmetry in form; whatever the creature is or has the potential to be, it seems not to be exempt from that particular pattern after all.

Giratina cannot return it to its home world. For one, Giratina doesn't know how it could have arrived here in the first place if not through a portal; for two, the dragon can't place its world. It made no mention of pokémon in its descriptions, which sets it as too far from the origin for Giratina to reach without leaving the Distortion World untended for a dangerously long time. But the cosmic beings sound uncannily like pokémon from the generation that followed Giratina's, even though the dragon's certain it should know everyone from that age.

Palkia can locate and open a portal to the universe. With some difficulty, Arceus can likely do the same. Giratina, however, has not sought peaceable contact with either of them since the humans in the bordering world learned how to use pokémon's abilities to help cultivate their food plants, and it would greatly prefer not to ever change that fact.

If the creature wishes to return, it can only find a method on its own. It's fully capable of doing so. It already came close earlier when it contacted the watcher through the ocean. Until then, Giratina can at least find a better climate for it. And do something about that leg as well, since the injury plainly inconveniences it.

Giratina tells it as much and waits while it etches. It seems to require writing as a bridge to comprehension. Or perhaps it needs only time to understand, the writing nothing but a supplement, as partway through the word it rather suddenly (and disappointingly) breaks off, shifting into a pale mist that reforms well out of Giratina's immediate reach. Did Giratina scare it somehow?

But of course it has no way of telling the dragon should that be the case. Giratina asks regardless, and after a pause the creature lets its weapons hang at its sides, though it takes another step back. If it wants to put much more distance between them, it'll have to move to a neighboring isle.

It's so _small_. For some reason, Giratina's mind keeps catching on that fact. The dragon has no recent experience actually interacting with anything of this size. Or, no, its size isn't the issue. Necrozma, who Giratina's familiar with for the number of times it's had to clean up after the light-eating pokémon's rampages, isn't very much larger, but it has never held itself like it expected to be blown over should someone like Giratina pass by too close to it. The dragon's watched it throw itself into battle against pokémon of comparable size without hesitation.

And now it watches the creature do just that as well.

The attack comes from so far out of left field that Giratina doesn't even think to phase and only even rears back purely out of reflex. The shallow cut it receives down its front is more bewildering than painful.

The next, from underneath, is the opposite. Giratina passes into shadow and materializes farther above the island, coiling around its wound. Blood sinks into the snow, into the white space that was so recently occupied by the creature's echoes. The creature itself is nowhere to be seen, but this world is Giratina's domain; it screams, long and high, and the gradients of the Reverse World's silence return an answer.

The creature's concealed itself perfunctorily under the overhang of the cliff, barely out of the dragon's line of sight. Giratina considers retaliating—it's only natural that it should take offense at such completely unprovoked aggression.

Eventually, it decides against it. It still has questions it's curious about, and no real harm was done. The scratches will heal.

It's a mystery why they were inflicted in the first place, but Giratina rather doubts the creature will answer if asked at this point. In any case, it plainly doesn't want the dragon near it; it does, however, still need to be relocated, since its wispy build should not in the least suit it for extended stays in colder climes. Simply snatching it up again now that Giratina knows it can speak seems rather crude, though.

Well, the dragon can hardly be blamed if it will not _use_ its speech. Turning to violence before words is the sort of unflattering behavior it expects from its siblings and creator and no one else. (Although – thinking on the matter, its siblings, at least, share a commonality with the creature of knowing no widely-used languages. But if there's a pattern, Giratina breaks it, and Arceus continues to have no excuse.)

It vanishes, sinking into the shadow beneath the cliff; the creature leaps away just in time as Giratina surges up from under it. It slashes the dragon as it passes, then moves quickly back and away from the dark tendrils that lash out to grab it.

Giratina hovers out of its range again and glances at the latest injury. Small and fragile it may be, but evidently the creature does know how to fight. Rather competently, too, considering its performance against an opponent who outclasses it to such an extent. The gap between them likely doesn't even faze it too much; if its tactics are anything to go by, it's accustomed to battling as the significantly weaker party.

Giratina usually counters more agile opponents through wide-area attacks of overwhelming force. That's not particularly applicable here – the last thing it would want is to kill the creature – which leaves the question of how it's going to catch the little thing. Paralyzing it would slow it down enough, but Giratina, not being naturally inclined towards producing it, can only muster up so much electricity before it'll need to rest.

Earlier, Giratina grabbed it while it was falling. Whatever its maneuverability on the ground, it has no method of changing course in the air. Giratina considers the angle. It's come out from under the cliff, which will make things simpler.

The dragon phases and reappears at the base of the cliff, putting the creature's back to the edge of the island. Giratina merges the tendrils on its back into wings and brings them forward, threading its own essence into the draft as sustenance. The creature staggers beneath the wind before it pushes its blade into the snow to anchor itself, refusing with annoying tenacity to allow itself to be blown off the island.

Giratina takes the moment while it's off balance to hurtle forwards. The creature turns into fog. Giratina winds around, and as soon as the creature reforms swings its tail; the creature ducks, dematerializes again when the tail comes down and smashes a pit into the snow, and darts to the side when tendrils reach for it.

It moves in for an attack, and Giratina calls up a shield. The expanding bubble slams it back while Giratina twists to face it, sparks glowing between the dragon's spread mandibles. The creature rolls to its feet, then sprints _towards_ the wave of electricity, losing its form just as the attack reaches it.

Giratina thought the fog was similar to a vaporeon's ability to become water, but it must be closer to Giratina's own skill: rather than turning into a different state of matter, what it's doing is momentarily displacing itself from reality. The dragon tosses up another gust before the creature reaches it, then bends down to pick it up – except, of course, it phases again and hurries backward, giving itself some illusion of distance.

Sustained wide-area attack of overwhelming force. Giratina is sorely tempted.

The creature doesn't make another move. Experimentally, the dragon starts to form a shadow ball between its mandibles; the creature shifts its stance, but nothing else. Giratina lets the energy dissipate, and the creature visibly tenses.

After a long stillness, it starts gradually to settle. Giratina eyes it dubiously. _It_ attacked first; what justification does it have for wariness now?

It takes a single step closer, acting like it expects Giratina to send a hyper beam its way any instant. It looks – and Giratina actually blinks at the strangeness of the notion, but – it puts Giratina in mind of the way the dragon itself acts around its creator. During the rare interactions where they aren't trying to maim each other, in any case.

Though comparing itself to Arceus is...

Unceremoniously shoving that thought aside for the moment (and all foreseeable future moments), the new perspective does frame the attack in a rather different context. Something it did clearly set the creature off. The dragon said something that unwittingly agitated it, and the creature's grasp of speech is limited enough that it has no words available to it that could explain the cause of its distress.

So: violence, the universal language.


	3. The Moon Presence

The other staggers under the force of her leap, still shrieking soundlessly, a steady howling litany of _what have you done how could you they killed me they killed me killed me_. Her claws tear deep into the writhing, exposed veins of his back, into the pale lines of half-healed scars. Blood boils up and spurts from the wounds as he flails.

Far too much blood. She springs back – late, and the edge of the explosion catches her, tosses her down the side of the hill as she scrabbles for purchase amid the flowers and grave markers, her twisted bones rattling with the impact. Red droplets score gashes in her papery skin where they land.

She's moved well past the utter, disbelieving shock of his breaking a taboo so intrinsic that its existence has never been considered. She trembles with rage and hate, and he shudders with pain and grief and blind fury, and their blood soaks into the fertile soil of her dream, painting the flowers a mirror of the scarlet moon that belongs only in the great hunt outside. How _dare_ he drag his animus into this place. At the base of the spreading tree at the top of the hill, her second child's headstone is strewn dust and pebbles. Her third, who fought beside her and is the reason the other's largest eyes are crushed mush dripping in globules from his face, was knocked over the fence and, at the end of the fall, transported elsewhere instead of returning as should have happened. The dream holds, indicating its host's state remains unchanged, but whatever the condition, her child has been stolen and hidden from her. Not kin (for she will never again have kin), but a child of hers nonetheless. She will not lose another one this way. She will not.

The other rushes towards her on myriad limbs, cosmic power gathering about him in his charge; she jumps just before the collision. For the briefest of moments, her shrunken wings seem to catch the still air, but then she's atop him and the feeling passes. Though arcane energy sears her feet, she pushes through the pain and wraps her tails around his skull, probing for the gaps her child opened.

He skids to a stop, the light around him sputtering as he smashes his head into the ground. She roars. As soon as he straightens, she retracts her bruised tails, wrenching them free from their grip. Ocular fluid sprays across the grass, and he screams. The scent of rot tangles itself into the lumenflowers. _Beast_ , she hisses. They're all monsters, these ilk of hers, but he's not even worth that anymore. He should be eyeless, the outward appearance to fit the mind. To confront her directly, to invade her dream – wrong, wrong, disgusting and _wrong_.

 _Nightmare_ , he accuses, as if that's a horrific thing to be, as if that can ever be worse than what he's done, _they killed me, you would help they who killed me_.

She leaps off of him. Some of the tension loosens from her frame when the flowers soothe her burned feet. She retreats a step, and her head tilts. Beneath this hill lie the remnants of the beast hunters her children have guided; when she reaches, they respond, blood that carries the echoes of their final dreaming moments trickling up to pool around her.

Nightmare indeed. Does he not realize he has no leg to stand on? Where is his self-awareness? He's barely sapient anymore, nothing but a putrid body of directionless violence. Her children have always had the right of it: mad things are to be put down. The cosmos will be purer without his taint. She looks at him, gaze meeting the oozing holes in his face, and beyond, to the darkness that hides the eyes inside. She says, _Die_.

Strength leaks from his body. He collapses in a pile of bleeding flesh; the unbroken ranting subsides to a wounded gurgle. While he struggles to regain himself, the blood around her rises, balling into globes like dark stars, until another command breaks their coherency and sends them scattering outwards.

The other tries to shake off the blood that sprays across him and steams against his body. She hurtles forwards, slams into his head with force enough to tip him over and send him to the ground. Her hair slithers into the crevices, seeking out the paths her tails gouged, while her claws scrape over his skull and catch in his swollen neck.

He melts under her, flesh turning spongy and bone softening, and she strengthens her efforts; then she loses her grip. Her feet slide, and she scrambles to keep her place but he's dissolving into the mist of another dream, escaping after all the damage he's caused. She rears and comes down heavily with claws and tentacles and rock-hard skull.

She crushes only flowers. For a moment, she stands still, surrounded by a thinning cloud of silver fog. Then even that fades, and she's alone on the hill. Blood and craters and shattered graves, and her child lost.

Her bones quiver, chiming like bells where they touch.

Her child's loss is not directly the other's fault. She doubts enough of him remains to plan such an elaborate kidnapping, and in any case, the one who actually sent her child over the side of the dream was her. They lost track of each other's positions, neither of them being used to combat alongside an ally, and by the time she realized what the odd weight she ran into was – well. But they would never have been placed in that position if the other did not invade. He is the root cause. She will have him slaughtered for it.

She consoles herself with the thought. The red moon has been beckoned, the great hunt initiated. He will die before the morn. The current mortals lack the spark that shone so brilliantly in her children, but they don't need to be radiant to feed a fire that's already burning. They will see the night through. They always have.

The cosmos answers her call hesitantly, but it answers. She is not so diminished as that. The shadows of stars flicker around her; beneath their light, her burns heal, her cracked bones mend, pain washes from her tails. She leeches the spilled blood deep beneath the ground and recreates the hill from memory as well as she can. Trenches fill in. Scorched earth lightens, the coating of ash dissolving to nothing. A headstone shimmers into existence at the base of the tree; she takes the time to remember the inscription exactly, the name _Gehrman_ worn from the countless instances her youngest (though her eldest by age, and the thought makes her ache terribly) has traced its edges with light fingers.

Some scars remain. The flowers must grow in on their own. The little servants will tend to the wounds the tree has suffered. They will pass. The only potentially lasting consequence is the other's blood. She has no idea what it will do should it remain in her dream; she recalls nothing of this nature happening before to give her a reference. When she retrieves her child, disposing of it will be a priority.

She paces through the flowers, tails kept languid by force of will. The workshop sits in easy sight, just over the fence and up the other hill. She watches it, hair undulating slowly. She does not, as a general rule, visit that half of the dream. Sometimes she rests on the roof of the workshop, sprawled comfortably with her tails hanging over the side, but for the most part it holds no interest for her. Her children's toy house.

She does not know where her child has gone. She has the scent of the other's dream now, lingering like smoke in her memory, and it does not match the traces of her child's disappearance. She settles back on her haunches between the roots of the tree. The bond is still there, still strong, but she realizes while she follows it that she will not be able to reach the other side before the night ends. The distance stretches too far.

It's as she's pulling her attention back that a wave of contact ripples from the other side. She rises to her feet, reaches to meet it, and then it retreats sharply. Snaps taut. Breaks.

She stills, processing what small flecks she managed to grasp. A glimpse of another of her kind, and yet not of her kind – same and different, reflections through the water. Giratina, it named itself, guardian of a cosmos that is not, molded from stardust and the shadows between nebulae when the creator forced the multiverse into existence. It does not know who she is, did not manage in that brief moment of contact to recognize _what_ she is.

In its grasp, her child. Revulsion touches her, makes her fist her claws against the earth. Giratina is not of her kind, yet the similarities render them near enough that it is just as much a violation as it would be if the other was truly the one to snatch her child.

That it does not know what it holds is an excuse, not consolation. For those like them, ignorance is a failing which should not be forgiven.

She has a location, at least. Unfortunately, her child literally could not have traveled to a place more difficult for her to reach. This world lingers at the fringe, a frontier where the infinite cosmos beyond warps the structured reality imposed by the originator of universes; Giratina's dimension, meanwhile, is the core of existence. It is not merely distance. Arceus guards its prized worlds jealously from those who draw their power from the lawless cosmos. Should she attempt the journey, she will die.

So she will find another way. The dream tethers them together, and she has resources aplenty at her disposal. She will not lose another child like this.


	4. Giratina III

Giratina's still rather hung up over the role reversal. It tries not to pay much mind to the fluttering sense of annoyance and focus instead on the fact that whatever its own conflicted feelings on the situation, the creature's under the impression that the massive spectral dragon intends to kill it. Perspective.

It takes an inordinate amount of convincing before the creature's willing to believe otherwise. Giratina has no idea what it said to upset the creature, so it keeps quiet in the interests of not further exacerbating the misunderstanding by accident. Except the dragon's sudden silence _also_ sets it on edge. Any trust the creature had in it before has evaporated completely; everything Giratina does now, no matter how innocuous, comes across as threatening. Not an unusual state of matters on its own – Giratina's quite aware that some aspect of its appearance is frightening to most of the younger generations.

It can't, however, recall off the top of its head any specific instance where it wanted to calm something down that was scared of it. There's never been any point. Its standard interactions involve it herding some displaced creature back through a portal with the expectation that they'll never meet again. It's working off of trial and error.

There are other things it should probably be doing. A pignite is throwing out powerful fire attacks near enough to a vehicle transporting petroleum that it can't have any idea what it's actually risking. In a universe with no pokémon like Rayquaza to guard them from space debris, a comet three miles across is about to enter the atmosphere of a life-bearing planet; that, in truth, does not fall under its responsibility, but mass extinction events create a great deal of work for it when thousands of billions of creatures attempting to survive near-simultaneously wreak havoc on physics. Better to preempt the problem where possible.

But the Distortion World can manage that sort of minutiae without guidance for a good while; Giratina only quietly nudges it to intercept the comet. (Somewhat difficult with the restrictions, but a bit of creative interpretation technically qualifies the atmosphere as a mirror. A reflective surface, anyway. Arceus won't care enough to find out when it wakes up.) This, meanwhile, is... different.

The creature writes a rune. Giratina waits until it finishes backing away before moving over to read it. A sea that hides a truth under clear waters. It does know a disproportionate number of water-related words. Giratina is starting to get an inkling of the kind of world it comes from; though... it had the idea earlier, but not seriously, and it shrugs it off once more now. Plenty of things place an importance on large concentrations of liquid water, a source of life and closest material analogy to the cosmos. The creature's home universe is not one of the outer planes.

Snow scrapes. The creature lowers itself to the ground, pulling its injured leg close and rubbing the place where the limb ends below the knee joint.

Giratina turns its attention back to the rune. The one who spoke it backed it up with an entire concept, every possible variation of meaning woven together into a single utterance. In the current context, it's a complete non sequitur no matter how Giratina considers it. (With a vaguely guilty sort of deliberateness, Giratina does not consider the idea that it's asking for the sea so it can find a way home. It likely isn't true anyhow; Giratina finds it difficult to believe the creature would request any favors from it at the moment.)

The dragon reaches down a tendril, sliding the red claw at the end into a furrow, and then, after a moment, drags it through the snow, adding another line to the word. Maybe the creature misspoke, after all. It stares at the modified rune for a few seconds. Then it pushes the snow back into place over the addition.

It tries on different meanings for size, combining them, separating the individual parts into smaller components. It's all very counter-intuitive – words should mean exactly what they say, no more and certainly no less, with none of this picking and choosing at definitions. The fact that most mortal languages do just that contributed in large part to Giratina's difficulties with them before it stopped trying to keep up with their rapid rate of change. It's not going to quibble at the errors, though, no matter how much they impede comprehension; that the creature can speak even like this is astonishing.

More than a few parts of the word might fit. Several of them contradict each other. It's a mystery which ones the creature means to convey. Giratina makes the attempt regardless, making for any progress at all.

Eventually, it runs out of ideas and starts going back over options it discarded. The creature waits, sitting patiently enough that Giratina feels the need to look over every once in a while to check its condition. Even though most living things would have frozen over without an outside heat source by now, it doesn't seem adversely affected by the cold. Its temperature hasn't changed at all, even in the extremities farthest from the core.

Is it an ice type? Though it all but said outright that its world doesn't have pokémon, typing isn't exclusive to pokémon. Elemental types correspond fairly consistently across worlds since they all draw their power from the same source. It's how pokémon can so easily change their types; how Giratina, as with other ghosts, was preserved after its death. Fire is weak to water – occasionally that goes both ways, and very, very rarely they're entirely reversed, but they're always related in some manner. True fairies, the ones who like to call themselves good neighbors, fare poorly against certain metals, don't seem at first glance to subscribe to the same laws of reality as everything else, and have a talent for sussing out the weaknesses of their worlds' dragons. Regular animals, humans included, carry a mild resistance to every type.

The creature can't be normal, since the wind Giratina blew at it earlier affected it; in the same vein, it's not ghost or psychic when it took the attack as well as it did, even with Giratina deliberately holding back. It actively avoided the paralyzing wave, so not ground or electric. Certainly not flying. Fairies typically have that inimitable sort of confidence which comes from being able to disregard dragons as a threat; one need only look to Arceus, who becomes that much worse to treat with when the Pixie Plate is in use, especially now that... the advantage applies to Giratina as well. Steel's a possibility considering its weapons of choice, but if so, it's very evasive for a member of a type capable of withstanding most attacks head-on without taking much in the way of injury. No; on second thought, Giratina can't imagine it as a steel type.

The dragon's sidetracking. It focuses back on interpreting the word, checks and re-checks possible meanings again. The creature shifts in position once, setting its arm over its knee and hunching forward slightly. It shows no signs of impatience while day in the bordering world creeps towards noon, and when the shadows begin to fill in Giratina eyes it, wondering for the first time whether it actually intended for Giratina to understand when it wrote the word.

The dragon lets the thought go after only a moment. Nothing speaks that doesn't want to be heard.

In the end, it's not the creature that interrupts it. A quake ripples through the Distortion World. Giratina lifts its head, perfectly still as the wave shears inexorably closer. At the last moment before contact, it phases.

The strain of keeping itself together without a debateably physical form's aid overcomes the trepidation of what will happen when it rematerializes. As soon it reforms, it stabs its spikes into the ground as an anchor. It's successfully avoided the leading edge of the quake, which is some consolation. The surface of its form wavers, wisps of ectoplasm peeling off despite its best efforts. A distant part of it recognizes that other dimensions are being shaken out of alignment – nothing permanent, they'll settle on their own within a century, but in the meanwhile a few are going to brush against each other and Giratina should do something about that.

The storm takes some days to pass. Giratina's not sure when among those days its spikes hit permafrost and its body sank inches into the snow, but it finds that it doesn't mind. It drags its tail around to cover its head, filters its eyes against the blood that tries to seep in, and for a while sleeps.

Oddly, though not unpleasantly, it wakes to the scent of flowers. It pulls its tail away and sees that the creature seems to have dug up a patch of gravel, melted the ice off, and somehow coaxed pale flowers into growth. They glitter against the snow, alive as so very few things in this world are.

The creature itself lifts its hand from the plants, shaking off shining motes of pollen, stands, and tilts its head back as if to meet Giratina's gaze. _Creator_ , Giratina says, too tired despite the rest to vocalize. The creature understands well enough, though, going by the writing, and after a moment the dragon drifts into slumber again. It has no dreams.


	5. The Old Hunter I

Several thousand years ago, Arceus fell into a long hibernation after losing a piece of itself to a grievous injury. Recently, it's begun to stir, and the energy of its awakening has been sending out intermittent shock waves.

Without the same awareness of its presence, you barely felt the quake but as a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, a quickening of breath that you corrected without fanfare. Giratina it flayed apart. Mixed in between the splashes of heady blood are strips of whatever material composes the Great One's body. When you tried to pick up a piece, it slipped like dust between your fingers and scattered to nothing.

Rather novel, seeing this from the outside after a long night spent on the receiving end. Although, whatever else one could truthfully say about the moon presence, she at least has never wrought damage of this extent by _accident_.

You can kill Giratina. Asleep, wounded – it would hardly have time to react if you called down a meteor storm. The thought's a clinical one, a detached visualization of procedure. Merely habit. You meet people with the expectation that you'll have to put a bullet in their head down the road. Simpler for everyone when the time comes if you have some idea already of how it should go.

It's a bad habit, really. You're not going to do anything to Giratina. Never were. You would rather return to the dream first.

You rest the heel of your palm over gauze, over an eyelid beneath it protecting nothing, focusing inwards. Faint though the brush of her mind is, the web of moonlight still blazes bright, the stars beyond its light dark and flickering as candles to the bonfire. You grimace under the mask. You did hope – well, not that it matters.

Carefully, quietly, you reach through the web. It took a while to discover that she doesn't think to maintain the net so long as you don't anger her. With how long it's been since she looked over it last, there are... not holes, nothing large enough to be called that, only areas where the threads have frayed or have loosened from their razor-wire tautness, barely widening the gaps. You can fit a small part of yourself through, enough to get a sense of what's on the other side.

Enough to bring something back. You've never really dared risk it, but she isn't watching now, and slowly you draw back in on yourself, cradling a dim glow away from the strings of the net.

You don't recall what temperature felt like, the difference between the warmth of sunlight and the coolness of the shade beneath an overhanging roof. The grain of the cosmos cupped in your hands, though, is _cold._ You have to hold at bay the urge to shrink away. Even through the gloves, the bones in your palms feel brittle and tender, itching with pain. You're not ready for this power.

You hold on to it until your fingers numb to the point you can't tell whether they're responding. You don't quite sigh then, and finally you let it fall into the lumenflowers. The plants don't need dregs of cosmic power once their seeds have sprouted, but it doesn't hurt them. It makes their blooms smell sweeter, and the doll tells you the color is better.

Usually you gather the power with A Call Beyond instead. While it might not be the usage Yharnam's Healing Church intended for the hunter tool, the phantasm itself has never protested, and the moon presence is only mildly disapproving. It's fine, you know she really loves you.

You can't think of anything more helpful to do. Your medical knowledge, even if it could apply to Great Ones and you had access to supplies, is near-entirely faulty. You used to regularly prescribe opium, just for starters. It was the accepted practice, and certainly it was better than no anesthetic at all, but you wince to think back on it. You wouldn't trust yourself within twenty feet of a modern operating table.

Giratina's healing well enough on its own, in any case. It's still missing a notable percentage of body mass, but the open wounds have closed over, and it was perfectly lucid during its brief bout of wakefulness. Regeneration's a useful skill.

Besides, you know from experience that the best things to have around are lumenflowers and a friendly voice. Not that you've been particularly friendly or much in the way of a voice, but Giratina plainly doesn't view you as anything remotely approaching a threat, which amounts to the same. It's better than being alone with her for company – just alone, for Giratina. You would make tea, too, if your hat wasn't the nearest thing to a pot around.

Since the Great One's not likely to wake again until it recovers, you sit down in arm's reach of the impromptu flower patch. Hard to stand for long on snow that a pegleg sinks eagerly through; it feels like at any given moment you're half a movement away from tripping over yourself. You're not going to use the beast cutter or rifle as a crutch, either. You're not that old yet.

Well, maybe a little. You're frozen at the age you were when the night began, though, which was... what? ...Must have been two digits. Your children weren't yet grown when you left – one of them just starting an apprenticeship, the other... they were the same age. So thirty-something, perhaps. Thereabouts.

The doll might remember. She tends to know her hunters better than they know themselves.

Does she have an idea of what's happened? You toy with the idea of returning just to tell her. It's an entertaining thought.

You will need to go back at some point, before the moon presence does something even more drastic than usual. That's not up for argument. For now, though, you only breathe and marvel at how much lighter you feel without the constant weight of her attention.

You did worry earlier that you would have to return. It was plain idiocy on your part, attacking someone who up until then showed you not an ounce of ill will despite your intrusion on its territory, but – it said it would help you. With your leg. You got the implication that it meant it would find you a new one less awkward than the current wooden stump – no mention of how or where from, which was plain alarming.

A story you grew up with told of a deeply pious miller. He prayed regularly, burned offerings of animal offal at the solstices, hung fresh holly and mistletoe in the winter to ward off evil thoughts, donated at church, read the holy word to his children as bedtime tales, so on and so forth. Because of his deep piousness, dark spirits and tempters were drawn to him, all of them hoping to corrupt such a holy man, but the purity of his faith gave them no access.

Unbeknownst to him, however, he had already invited evil into his home: his wife had begat their eighth child by a different man.

(For added horror, you've heard it told with the man as the miller's brother. He's never brought up again either way.)

The miller eventually discovered what she did. The child was older by then, however, and he had already raised and loved it for many years as his own. For the first and only time in his life, he turned his back on the gods to help his wife conceal the deception from their church and neighbors.

The dark spirits immediately pounced on his weakness, and all his family but for him came down with an incurable plague. The wife and her bastard died on the spot. As one does.

When physicians failed to save his children, he naturally turned to prayer. But as he had abandoned the gods, so did the gods abandon him, and his prayers went unanswered. An evil spirit heard him instead and twisted his wishes back on themselves. He wanted his children to live, the evil spirit declared, so live they should; and it turned them into adders, which of course couldn't be afflicted by a human sickness. When the miller returned that day from trading for black pudding at the market, the snakes bit him to death, fled into the woods, and were all eaten by crows.

You're fairly certain that the evil spirit in the story was a benevolent Great One as well as the god the miller was praying to in the first place. Undoubtedly it meant well, but a Great One's idea of _helping_ does not typically align with the sort of thing the person being helped might actually appreciate, or benefit from.

While you know the Caryll runes for _no_ and _stop –_ several variations of them, in fact – they... Caryll runes are perfect transcriptions of a Great One's words. Enough meaning to fill an essay condensed into a single shape. Because the Great Ones aren't expecting to be recorded, they tend to go into a good amount of personal detail. Once you learned to read them past the surface meaning, it became a simple matter to identify through any rune what the original speaker's relationship with the target was and the context in which the word was spoken.

Every word you could have used to tell Giratina you don't want its help lays out comprehensively what you are to the moon presence.

That's between you and her. It's hardly anyone else's concern.

So you turned to your resort for when words fail. You expected negotiations to end then; the attack should have antagonized Giratina past any hope for reconciliation. Hostility can only be answered in kind. Even gentle, placid Rom defended herself with lethal force when she was roused.

Between a choice of letting Giratina squash you or actively trying to kill it first, you were gathering yourself to take the third option: returning to the hunter's dream, giving up an opportunity you're not likely to receive again in your lifetime. You implied to it that you don't know the way back so it wouldn't chase you out. In truth, staying here is a constant drain on your energy; returning, meanwhile, just means falling asleep. Or, if you're in something of a rush, hitting your head against a rock hard enough would do it.

But then Giratina _backed off_ , of all things.

It didn't stop so it could prepare an attack that would probably vaporize you if you let it connect. It simply called off the fight.

You're not actually sure that it's a Great One in the usual sense, not after that. Oh, it's certainly some sort of deity – its blood smells of starlight, if starlight could be as pungent and distracting as finely aged alcohol, with a sickly sweet undercurrent similar to that in the moon presence's. Only, it might not be Kin.

Which does raise the question of where you are. You didn't aim for anywhere specifically when you catapulted yourself out of the dream, just a place the moon presence couldn't immediately retrieve you from.

Maybe you could have come up with something a tad better thought-out if you had longer than a few seconds to work with. However, you could never have planned for a Great One directly invading her – your – your shared sanctum, which wasn't a possibility until it happened. You couldn't have been more surprised if Gehrman pulled himself out of the grave, or if the entire cosmos up and vanished. You couldn't wrap your mind around it even with him in easy shooting range, reeking of tomb-mold and pus from the blood that flowed freely without skin to halt it, wailing like a beast set aflame. What would have to happen to break a god?

The reality only clicked in time for you to get out of the path of his initial charge. The moon presence didn't descend until you already sawed off a limb (bad idea, as it turned out: the boneless hand thing exploded into caustic blood when it touched the ground, because of course it would) and spent near every bullet on you shooting half his eyes out. She moved with none of her usual liquid poise, so stunned by disbelief that she couldn't focus on controlling her body – even fractured as she is, never at her lowest has she considered personally going after another Great One in its own home. That's what she kept you for.

It's hectic enough keeping track of multiple combatants without them acting erratically on top of it all, and you couldn't predict either one of them in abilities or actions. (It was your first time witnessing the moon presence in combat, and it turns out that even by Great One standards her abilities are bizarre.) You were bound to get stuck in a bad position at some point. Honestly, you're mostly just relieved that it was the moon presence who knocked into you. The trespassing Great One weighed in the tons; you couldn't have survived a similar collision with him, and wouldn't that have been a way to go after all this time.

A few pertinent facts lined up for you on the way down:

You weren't necessary for the remainder of the fight. You did enough damage to the other Great One that the moon presence, freshly arrived and on her home ground, would have a difficult time losing. She still could, of course, but she's your god. You could stand to have faith in her.

The hunter's dream isn't meant to house more than a single Great One. Having two there destabilized it, leaving the rules a little more malleable than usual.

You were approaching the boundary of the dream, the least well-defined area even under normal circumstances.

The moon presence wasn't paying the least attention to you, wasn't paying attention to anything other than the foreign Great One in her dream.

And, if anything unprecedented happened, you had a ready scapegoat for her to attribute it to.

Spur-of-the-moment. A sudden, overwhelming realization that you did not want to be there. You lunged through the web, set every thread on it resounding like church bells, but the other Great One's cries deafened her. She didn't hear. And the cosmos answered.

Kind of it. It even dropped you somewhere interesting, in the company of a Great One who didn't try very hard to kill you despite your provoking it. You can't complain at all.

Now, what are the chances Giratina will pull you into its vendetta against Arceus?

You wipe snow over the beast cutter's teeth, teasing the blood off, then pat it dry on a section of your pants that the long coat kept safe from splatters. You hold no real fondness for it, but it is the weapon you're best with, and it's never done you wrong. Treating it right is a responsibility.

Then you reach under your coat, flip open a pouch on one of the belts, and slide out a deck of cards with thick droplets of dried glue marking the corners.

It's good to play on your own for once. You can't very well lose against yourself. Your many, many humiliating defeats have whittled away any hero worship the messengers felt for you, the little pests; the only thing you're better than them at is shuffling. (You can't claim even that much against the doll.)

Partway through the game, after a while of searching for a card to lay down, you switch to stacking towers instead. Using snow for support structures expands the range of possibilities by quite a bit.

A strong breeze topples your eight-storey tower before you can make it a nine-storey tower. You blow out a breath, then pick up the cards in reach and stand to go collect the rest. This is an invaluable deck, the only one of its kind. The dream has no others like it. The messengers will be disappointed if you lose part of it.

You'd like to get some backups, and maybe pick up a few board games while you're at it, but the messengers refuse to loot objects from the waking world for their own use or at the request of someone who isn't hunting. It's a matter of duty for them. You can't tell the doll to ask the hunters to bring something back to the dream, either. Hundreds have passed through the workshop while you've been host, and not one of them has been able to see her. Not _one_.

You're a bit torn. On the one hand, it's brilliantly resourceful to turn obliviousness into an impenetrable armor.

On the other, you think you've begun to understand how the Pthumerians felt about humans.

The wind picks up, and you pause. It smells like raw sewage thrown onto a fire. It also carries a rather potent airborne poison that might be intended to cause lung failure. There's no one else nearby so far as you can tell, so what...?

You flip through the deck, counting for any missing cards; they're all present, so you head in the direction the wind blew from. The scent grows stronger for a short distance, then weakens again. You backtrack to the spot where it's thick enough that you feel like your nostrils have clogged and pick a different path.

You mark out the boundaries of a cloud of toxic fog about ten feet in diameter. A circuit around the perimeter confirms that it isn't dispersing, content instead to stick in a clump right where it is. It takes some effort, but you manage to locate the source: in the center of the cloud is a sort of fold, inches across and rapidly shrinking, where space doesn't fit together properly.

Probably not a natural feature. You hold it open, stopping the rift from sealing over. It would be simple to pull it wide enough to step through.

Your hand falls. The distortion snaps neatly closed. The cloud smells frankly offensive, but that is not sufficient reason to risk your life marching recklessly into unknown and quite certainly hostile territory. You've no grudge against the entities on the other side worth slaughtering them for. You head back to the flowers that don't register the poison any more than you do and only wrinkle your nose when the fog occasionally loses a wisp your way.


	6. Giratina IV

Giratina wakes up to a thoroughly welcome surprise: somehow, during the few scant days while it was incapacitated, its siblings have tried to murder one another. It twines about the crystals that look into Palkia's nightmare, seething.

One of the Distortion World's unguided attempts to mitigate the damage from their spat drifts too close. The dragon swats the pollusive cloud apart with more force than strictly necessary.

The creature's a more receptive audience than the unaware reflections of Giratina's siblings through the crystals, even though Giratina can't see it with it sitting on the dragon's head behind the crown. (Giratina's trying to make a trust exercise out of it. The dragon will trust the creature not to ram its blade downwards, and maybe in turn the creature will trust Giratina not to do whatever frightened it so much earlier.) Giratina puzzles out the cause behind the fight aloud, and though the creature doesn't speak, it reacts every once in a while with some very slight movement. Although it might simply be adjusting to a more comfortable position; Giratina's not sure which. The dragon is fairly confident it's listening, at least.

The conflict on its own wouldn't be out of the norm. What gives the dragon pause and makes the Reverse World flounder in its work is the genuine intent to harm behind their attacks. Dialga and Palkia aren't on especially good or sour terms, being largely ambivalent towards each other, but they're close in a way that Giratina has never come near to understanding. Which doesn't particularly make sense. They have little contact, and they're very different people – not polar opposites, nothing so drastic as that, but their personalities don't have much in the way of similarity either.

Still, it is what it is. They have their disagreements, and they argue, but they don't _fight_. On the rare occasions they come to blows, it's all posture and bluster. They don't need more when dealing with each other. A dispute over territory shouldn't have led to this.

Some investigative poking into the pieces of territory in question explains the disparity.

The vast majority of each of the siblings' realms is empty. They consider it a part of their territories still, but if, say, Palkia passed through the Distortion World on its way elsewhere, Giratina wouldn't give it a second thought.

If it passed through Giratina's _nightmare_ , that would... not that such would happen, but if it did – it wouldn't. In any case, each of their dreams is located in their own domains inside pockets of space not quite aligned with the rest of the dimension, and it seems like the quake knocked Palkia's and Dialga's dreamscapes into each other. For the two of them, it's akin to a mutual declaration of war.

A bit of movement from one of the windows catches Giratina's attention. It drifts nearer and peers through to spot a pair of starly flit overhead, one after the other. The window looks out from the surface of what's most likely a pond.

The dragon shifts the angle, looking for a shore, and finds a bridge instead, an arched construction of grey stone. A chinchou's golden bulb fills the view a moment later, and the crystal shimmers and fades as the reflection breaks.

It's populated. The town Palkia subsumed for its nightmare is populated.

It wasn't possible to tell before – the other crystals have their lines of sight halted by buildings, or are too far from the ground to see the movement on the paths – but Giratina didn't try too hard, either. It assumed naturally that the town was abandoned or that Palkia left most of the people living there outside. A baseless assumption, in retrospect. To Palkia, the main distinguishable difference between a krookodile and the sand it lives in is that one consists of a larger percentage of dihydrogen oxide. It might not have noticed that it dragged in some hundreds of thousands more living souls than the nightmare requires; if it did, Giratina doubts it cares.

How did it even find an entire town willing to house it? Worship of Palkia has dwindled among humans in the bordering world. Religion in general has: Giratina imagines it might be difficult to revere a pokémon, no matter how powerful, when even the newer individuals of one's species can easily acquire devices to capture them. They've moved on from asking others for answers to self-reliance. Giratina's watched the transition with considerable interest since it first realized what was happening. Humans do still worship, but the days of entire population centers unified in belief have passed.

A part of Giratina regrets the shift. There was a people some while ago, from before Giratina's death as well as the schism of pokémon and human societies, who worshiped Giratina. Giratina treasured them above nearly anything before or since. The dragon defended them from their enemies and natural disasters, watched over the new rulers while they grew, and walked the roads of their cities. When a mareep it interacted fairly regularly with came to it because the doctors said his human friend would die from an illness, Giratina took the human to a world where the people had a better understanding of biology, returning him after they cured him. Every household hung up mirrors so it could see in, and public buildings always kept a clear, reflective pool inside the main entrance for it to travel through. Theirs was the last language it learned.

There may never be others like them. But though Giratina tends to think back on them without much negative tint, that might be for the better. After expanding into an empire that covered three of the nine continents of the time, they turned their conflicts inwards. The new rulers and managers began to look at Giratina as a political symbol to be aimed against their opponents. When the dragon, irritated by the constant condescending vying for its support, stopped visiting the capital, most everyone interpreted the absence as the regime having lost its favor. While not untrue, they shouldn't have allowed Giratina's opinion to color their own to that extent; but they did, and the empire splintered into disparate factions before two decades passed.

That was before the schism, of course, and a host of other significant changes – the retreat of glaciers back to the poles, Regigigas's awakening and the latest continental shift, and the reinvention of agriculture by humans, among others. Since the split, humans have tended to be more fearful than reverent of powerful pokémon. They've developed fewer widespread religions, and the tone of their practices leans more towards practicality than awe.

Even those have begun to die away since the usage of pokéballs became mainstream. Scattered groups of humans still worship, but religion, by and large, has become dominated by pokémon, whose beliefs and practices vary widely between individuals. Very little remains that's organized or focused enough to construct a nightmare with, and certainly nothing centered on Giratina or its siblings, who rarely venture from their own realms and have been all but forgotten.

Well, it's not impossible that the dragon overlooked some people after all. Giratina rather doubts they could have anticipated the possibility of a nightmare when they started worshiping Palkia, though.

No, they definitely didn't. A puddle gives a blurry view of a human and a pikachu take off into the fog wall surrounding the town, and the reaction of them and their companions when the two come running back is clearly agitated.

There's not much to be done about it, though. All Giratina can do is open paths for the residents to evacuate through, but likely none of them would recognize the portals as anything benevolent.

...unless.

The creature stands before Giratina can propose the idea, one hand on the dragon's crown for balance, its first major reaction since Giratina mentioned Palkia's and Dialga's dreams colliding. That seems to be all. The dragon waits, but the creature does nothing else, and Giratina, somewhat more uncertainly, makes its request.

A few caveats, naturally. Keep near reflective surfaces – should it find itself at risk, or decide for any reason at all not to carry on, Giratina will bring it back immediately. Don't keep trying if its efforts aren't bearing fruit. Stay away from Palkia; don't draw its attention.

However, if it agrees, and if it succeeds in convincing the population to come to the Reverse World, Giratina will be able to open a path for them back into their own universe. The geography's a lost cause, of course, but the lives might be preserved.

Giratina's not entirely sure whether it wants the creature to refuse or accept. The plan, such at is, is a long shot, and would put the creature in a great deal of danger. If Palkia for whatever inane reason decides to attack it, or if the humans of the town mistake it for a pokémon and try to capture it (equally inane in the circumstances, but an unfortunately large proportion of humans have no sense of scale), there's a high likelihood Giratina won't be able to rescue it in time. Then there's the communication barrier to overcome – Giratina doesn't expect that it speaks the local human language, and it likely won't understand pokémon either.

Better if it refuses, actually. Giratina will just grab Palkia after it leaves its nightmare and force it to return the town, and hopefully that will happen before the residents wither from age, are taken by ghost pokémon, or fade into... it's Palkia, so most probably unown. That stands a much, much higher chance of success, and the only one likely to suffer injury, aside from the townspeople, would be Palkia.

The creature hasn't yet responded in any manner – since it doesn't have its runes as a support, there's a longer delay before it comprehends Giratina's words. With a much more feasible plan decided on, Giratina retracts the request before the creature can muster an answer.

It expects that to be the end of the matter.

Since it can't do anything about the nightmare – an unpleasant thought, but a true one, and there's no use in dwelling on it – the dragon looks out across the Distortion World, clicking its mandibles at the sight of the dark clouds marring the landscape.

The Reverse World will have an easier time annihilating the pollution if the stuff isn't clumped thickly together. The dragon will have to disperse the fog banks itself if it wants them cleared away anytime soon, which it very much does. The world won't be able to do its work as well as it should with Palkia and Dialga's detritus clogging up the gears. And the poison is a hazard.

More than that, though, it feels filthy to all of Giratina's senses. It's the result of Palkia and Dialga waging battle inside a dream that should never have been shared. Giratina wants it to have never existed; failing that, it wants it to cease existing with all possible haste.

Without preamble, the dragon gathers a ball of pure, uncolored energy between its mandibles and fires a hyper beam. The light shrieks and crackles through the air, obliterating instantly the first cloud it hits. Giratina turns its head, and the beam cuts around an island to shred through two other clouds. It manages another four before the orb, energy spent, collapses, and the mandibles snap closed.

The light vanishes immediately, but the roar takes a while longer to fade. By the time it does, Giratina has concluded that it does not feel any less irritated. On the contrary, really – that was the least efficient method of going about the task that it could have chosen.

For some reason, the notion of preparing a second beam remains incongruously tempting.

A few soft impacts against its crown steer its thoughts away.

The creature's blade swings out, its arc bringing it just short of the nearest floating crystal before retracting. There... aren't terribly many ways to misinterpret that. Giratina watches the scene through it – Palkia nestled in its force field, the window looking up from a negligible distance below it. The shield, in contrast to its occupant, is in constant flux, pink brightening and dimming in splotches across each layer; Palkia isn't too significantly injured.

Giratina asks the creature if it's certain. It doesn't reply, but it doesn't protest either.

The dragon winds its way over to a squat building. The interior isn't furnished in the Distortion World, and the large mirror in the room past the entrance doesn't exist, but at this distance Giratina can mark out objects on the other side of the dimensional barrier without effort.

The creature clambers over its crown, slides down to the dragon's mandibles, and jumps from there to the ground. Once it straightens, it rolls its shoulders. Adjusts its head covering. Turns its masked face to Giratina, who, oddly reluctant, looks away from it and tells the Distortion World to shift aside at the mirror.

The rush of wind that accompanies the portal's opening completely covers the sound the creature makes. Giratina doesn't hear it at all, only notices it for the faint vibrations at the air near its neck.

The creature stays still for long enough that Giratina wonders if it's having second thoughts. Then it rubs the heel of its palm against its forehead, shakes its head, makes a motion that would be a sideways glance towards Giratina if it came from a seeing creature, and walks through the hole in the world.


	7. The Old Hunter II

Cotton cloth and rubber. Turpentine, beeswax, linseed oil. Perfume, subtle but lingering, threaded through a heavy jumble of fur, feathers, dirt and stone dust, people... too much to stay there sorting apart, though a few pieces reach out for attention even after you've dismissed the rest.

A cobbler's shop, empty since – oh, not so long ago. You tap your false leg against the floor, careful not to scratch the wood boards, and listen to how the sound returns. Too much clutter, too many scattered obstacles, but you visualize the boundaries of the room with a few inches' error margin. A hollow space, probably a stairway, behind... that'd be a counter, and the wall farthest from it turns back the clearest echo.

You hold out a hand at waist height and step forward until your fingers knock into the heel of a shoe. You set the shoe back into place, then find the top of the shelf. Keeping your hand brushing over the wood, you make your way towards the window.

It's a good thing you're wearing gloves. Otherwise, the glass would be smeared with fingerprints by the time you divine that the entire wall and the door all make up the shopfront. They must have a way around the cost of glass and the poor insulation in cold weather.

The chimes overhead jingle when you push the glass door open. You stop, one foot on the cobbles, listening to gently ringing silver.

Some shops have those. That's right. It's been a while since you've walked through a town, and longer still since you walked through a town willing to use bells insignificantly. Your... you think it was your whitesmith who had them. You remember the chimes when you went to him after your daughter dented a cup in a fit of pique. She threw it at a wall – your head, actually, but her aim was always atrocious when she was upset – then spoke some sentiments that you've no doubt she meant wholeheartedly. Marcel, though less demonstrative, looked up from his hands whenever his twin touched on a topic he especially agreed with. They didn't care much for you at all in the beginning.

Then she stomped out the door and, once she came back, refused to look at you. She kept it up for the better part of a month before you made the mistake of telling your older brother of what happened. He made her stay with his family for a night; the next afternoon when you went to collect her, she was sullen but willing to give you a chance. You still haven't puzzled out what he could have said to her. (To be fair, you haven't made much of an effort. You don't think about them often if you can help it: when you do, your thoughts inevitably twist towards how they might have died.)

...You're truly doing this, aren't you. Here you are again in a foreign city – one which, twelve footsteps into, already puts you far more in mind of your birthplace than of Yharnam – having been requested by a god to actually help a populace for motives and with parameters it only failed to convey fully because it made some incorrect assumptions about your knowledge base. History through a carnival mirror.

Well, best get on with it. You let the door swing closed.

You have a few plans laid out. Or one plan with a few variables. Glass half full, glass half empty. You'd really prefer to try finding the local ruling power and convincing them to organize an evacuation; unfortunately, that's out of your physical capabilities, so you'll make do with something a little less tidy.

Should it not work, you'll resort to a more precise approach, but you don't think that will be necessary. Emotional people tend to be easy to persuade into doing things they wouldn't normally consider, like traveling through portals of dubious origin to an unknown destination. Which, conveniently enough, is just what you have to persuade them into doing.

First, you'll need a public fountain or a park with a pond. You told yourself you wouldn't try for glass because it would be difficult to find at a proper size, but that excuse falls apart with how ubiquitous it is. It would be simpler, even, to use glass rather than water. Shallow, though. Plain glass, once cooled, has no character. As for mirrors, true mirrors – you could. You won't. You entered this nightmare through a mirror; that's quite enough.

If you get desperate enough, you'll consider them. Otherwise, you'd much rather use water.

Once you have that, you'll need to learn the locals' threat response and how developed a mob mentality they have.

There are people on the street. Three to the left, fifty feet away and stretching that distance farther at the same pace as each other, two of them speaking gravely but without urgency. Both men, both a good half foot taller than you. The quiet one, who's hovering a little ahead, is skipping. You would have an easier time identifying them if you had scent to work off of as well, but the air's stale and windless, weighted by Palkia's presence.

Two to the right, not together, and one of them walking towards you. You can pick out without any difficulty the instant that one notices you: the steady stride comes to a jarring halt punctuated by the scuff of their shoes against the cobbles. What must you look like to them? Nothing good, obviously, but that's neither specific nor particularly helpful –

A quiet click, a less quiet rushing noise accompanied by crackling, and there's someone who's not Kin standing in front of them. Reflexively you take a step forwards, then catch yourself before you can be any more overtly threatening to the new arrival who was... beckoned? He can't have been. The human called on him so casually, and he answered readily. Summoning Kin isn't something done without ceremony at the merest suspicion of a threat. That's a good thing. When Kin and mortals mix, people on both sides tend to die messily, best of intentions notwithstanding. Simply because it's a part of the natural order doesn't mean it need occur too often.

But then again, he isn't Kin, is he?

There was no hint of the arcane involved in his appearance, either. He might have materialized out of – not air, you would have noticed him if he was merely gaseous. No, he might have materialized out of nothing at all.

You did want to know the locals' threat response. Evidently it's to conjure powerful magical entities from a source you can't immediately identify.

Well, better to find that out early. Immediately. Within minutes of arrival.

Typical, really.

You hope this person's the equivalent of a high-ranking Choir member. Realistically, though, with the way your luck runs they're probably an untested civilian and every other townsperson can duplicate the feat.

The person – young woman – speaks what's possibly a question and is certainly worried and suspicious. The not-Kin hisses, takes a small step forward on a clawed paw. You twitch for your weapons and only just clamp down on the urge to draw them. You chose the beast cutter and Ludwig's rifle for their sheer brute power. They maim when they don't kill, which is invaluable against multiple opponents but somewhat less useful against people you've no intention of hurting. The street's too narrow to use them well in, in any case. Bare hands only.

The woman's raised voice alerts the others on the street. The bulk of their attention settles on you rather than the not-Kin or even the woman, which is puzzling until you realize the implication.

When you suggested that everyone in the town knows the technique she used, it wasn't meant to be some sort of – some sort of _challenge_ , or – oh, but what does it matter.

The child tries to sidle nearer, but one of the adults pulls them behind him. Good man; you discount him from the list of potential combatants. He calls out, and the woman responds uncertainly. The not-Kin hisses again.

What is he if not Kin? He sources his power from the cosmos, but it's oddly diluted. Refracted, more like, a single instrument plucked out from the orchestra. It's expertly done, this fracturing. If you didn't know already that it's only a disconnected part, you doubt you would suspect that it's been split from a whole.

The cosmos is knowledge, creation, infinity, the cold dark that conceived light and the dreaming mind. To break it apart, to destroy the meaning of it – what does that leave behind?

The lone person steps up beside the woman and speaks to her in a voice that carries. Four lines into the conversation, the tone begins to angle from uncertainty towards conviction. The man behind you who hasn't yet contributed offers his own piece over your head, and then the rustle of a sleeve as he raises his arm, a familiar click –

You're running before the rush of the summoning ends. The not-Kin leaps for you with a growl; he's small enough that you can quicken right through him without risk, and as soon as your foot hits the ground another quickening takes you past the humans.

They don't pursue. You take a turn, breaking line of sight, and slow to a walk.

Someone notices you. A few not-Kin sit clustered on a roof farther down the street, too close together for you to count, and another alone inside a house, but it's not any of them. It must be a human behind a wall or far enough away you can't hear them.

The attention doesn't waver, and you keep yourself from tapping your fingers against the beast cutter's handle. What about you stands out so much? The weapons? The armor? Your obviously foreign origins? Is it anything you can actually change?

Well, to the locals' credit, you might not need to make yourself less conspicuous. They're shockingly reasonable for people who attracted a Great One directly into their home. They marked you out as an anomaly, but weren't willing to act on it before they were more certain, or (the likelier option, with the direction the conversation sounded like it was going in) before they had safer numbers; when you fled, they didn't give chase because you offered them no reason to. They're not people who would chase someone simply for running away. Meaning that when other trouble comes up, you should be able to run away from that too.

It occurs to you the infrastructure here is significantly better maintained than Yharnam's or your hometown's. The town as a whole doesn't suffer a lingering undercurrent of blood or waste or sweat, a fair marker of a sewer system that, unlike your hometown's, functions as more than an oft-repeated metaphor for the government and, unlike Yharnam's, isn't clogged with rotting bodies and giant diseased rats. You haven't come across so much as a single oddly sticky patch or misstepped on a poorly laid cobblestone, either. If you tried sprinting in Yharnam in your state while not already being intimately familiar with every shadowed corner, you wouldn't make it two steps without tripping over a curb or a pile of rubble or a corpse or a stairway or a crate or a crib or a wagon wheel or... it didn't feel like there was such an extensive list of things to trip over while you were haunting the streets. Hindsight lends a different perspective, you suppose. Or maybe just sight.

Conversely, the flatness of the town doesn't help at all. You keep expecting there to be an incline, but there's nothing at all. It shouldn't be too difficult to grow used to. Your hometown was flat as a board too, you recall. Still, it's disorientating. You worry a little that you'll get turned around and not even notice, though you're fairly sure that's an irrational concern. You're not completely incompetent.

The person's attention falls away on its own. You listen for a door opening behind you, but nothing happens, which you take as tentative confirmation of your theory about the townspeople not being hostile without some cause.

Concrete confirmation comes later: the next few humans (who you're only referring to as such at the moment for lack of another descriptor, as the people you'd normally call humans couldn't react nearly so calmly to arriving in a nightmare whether or not they were aware of what happened) who come across you only move to the other side of the street and stare as you pass. A few give what might be uncertain greetings, which you ignore for not knowing how to return them. The surprisingly ubiquitous not-Kin disregard you entirely, except for those at ground level, who skirt around you when you pass at only slightly more of a distance than they give to humans and the others of their kind. You might be a walking through a normal town on perfectly mundane business if you put from your mind the deliberate avoidance. It's nearly surreal.

Though admittedly you could make an identical argument for anything. Yharnam's Cathedral Ward, for instance, was a perfectly pleasant locale to spend part of a night in if one didn't mind the... well.

A few other factors ground you through the illusion. The first instance one of the voices with no tangible source sounds from directly behind you, you burst away about as fast as you've ever moved and swing the blade down on it. By the time thought catches up to reflex, you're already retracting the blade. It hit stone without passing through any resistance on the way. The chattering – which sounds a little panicked now that you pay attention (though you could be projecting)– hasn't changed in tone or trajectory. No harm done. It cuts off on its own as soon as it meets a wall.

You sling your weapons over your back after that. Drawing them will take a bit longer from there.

The locals react to the voices too, jumping or crying out when the things show up too close to them. They seem wary, perhaps somewhat frightened, but the voices never respond to them and cause no harm when they pass through a person. They're not ghosts. They might be leaking over from another dream, or a different layer of this one. If that's what they are, there's no reason for them to be immediately dangerous.

Besides that, the place is oddly muted for a city of this size, the streets nearly bare, shops closed, homes quiet. The paper globes strung across washing lines between the houses rustle on occasion, and you hear them clearly without trying to. Not empty, per se, but quiet.

On some level at least, they must be aware of Palkia. You can't imagine being able to miss it. Though you couldn't point out a direction, you know it's within the bounds of the nightmare like you know where your own leg is. It's simply there: in the mortar, in the stone, in the air you're bringing into your lungs to join with your blood and marrow. Given long enough, it will morph the town into something wholly new.

The real danger isn't what Palkia will turn the town into while it's here, though. The change won't happen in a single night. You're more concerned about what will happen when it leaves. It's spread thin, as if it invested no more than what it had to in order to take the town for itself. It hasn't tried to make a home of the place. It built this nightmare for a single reason and never meant for it to outlast its purpose. A more mercenary approach to dreaming than you're used to, but you're not without a frame of reference – Rom crafted something similar, if layered and intricate enough that this nightmare might have been cobbled together from building blocks in comparison.

You don't recall what became of the lake after you – killed her. Once you fled with the moon bearing down on you and Rom's blood unfurling like blossoms in the water beneath your feet, you weren't in any state to consider going back until it all stopped mattering. Under the paleblood sky, you weren't yourself. Weren't entirely yourself. You don't know. Maybe you were, but the rest of the town warped around you and left you untouched. You remember...

Nothing. You stop grinding the back of your wrist against your ear, shake your head, swallow. You nearly choke and hurriedly press your tongue against the inside of your teeth to staunch the cut. Nothing at all.

You don't know what will happen to the town when Palkia is through with it. If it will hold steady, if it will return to sunlight and the waking world, if it will disperse when Palkia wakes, as dreams so often do.

You'd rather not get the chance to find out. You've had... enough of being too late for the things that matter.

You find water in a decorative public fountain. A fairly large one, though not disproportionate for the size of the square. Fair stalls clutter the edges of the open area, seating places between them and closer inwards, and not a small number of people filling in the blank space.

Most of the stalls have stopped selling. A few are, some half-heartedly and others clearly trying to take advantage of the vacant competition, but the majority have packed up their wares. They weren't prepared for this at all, were they? They chose a poor time for the celebration, if that's what it is and not merely the result of a cultural difference that makes their ordinary market seem like a fair to you. You'd suspect it to be the catalyst that allowed Palkia to make a nightmare of the city, but none of the locals seem to have any real idea what's happened. If they did, they'd be trying to do something about it, or at least have stronger feelings about the situation than listless worry.

The whole square smells faintly of fried cinnamon bread, the last warm food item still for sale. In the stillness, you're drawing attention.

The locals know about this place. It'll do.

You walk up to the fountain. You take a seat on the brim of the lower basin. You wait.

There are few things quite as suspicious as an armed person with their face covered sitting quietly in the middle of a public space at a spot not meant to be sat on. If the fact that you were accosted after doing nothing more incriminating than coming out of an unmanned shop is any indication, you're one of those things.

This shouldn't take long, thankfully. As more people notice you, you trample down the urge to bounce your leg. You'll only feel more on edge if you show your antsiness.

You're counting on the locals' rationality to a much greater extent than you're comfortable with. You don't think they'll come at you without giving some sort of warning first, like what happened earlier, but one case can't establish a pattern. If they do ambush you, the fountain might provide some brief cover, but the space around it is free of potential shields as far as you can tell. As far as you can tell – and that's part of the problem too. Some not insignificant part of you misses the hill, that place where you know every headstone hidden under the flowers and can orient yourself by the degree of the slope. You're clumsy enough in a fight without the terrain working against you as well. And as for that summoning technique...

You'll work things out. Or you won't. However it goes, you'll have tried; you've disappointed yourself enough to know better than to ask more than that.

Still. You rap your knuckles against the fountain's stone brim as a pair of humans, one with a feathered not-Kin balanced on their shoulder, approach. Here's to hoping you can accomplish a bit more than _trying_ this time, for all the good hope will do. You could do without a second city resting on the wizened remains of your conscience.


	8. Brock

Brock's pokédex has the time as four in the afternoon. Ash's, the last he saw him before the younger trainer joined the hunt for Darkrai, showed noon, and Dawn's hasn't twitched from eleven since the fog enveloped Alamos Town. He can't know how long it's been since Darkrai put the first of its victims to sleep. If he had to guess, he'd say it hasn't been fewer than six hours, and he'd be deliberately lowballing to counter the effect of stress on his time perception.

That might be why Nurse Joy chases him out of the pokécenter.

So he takes a walk, gets some air. Though his mind feels blurred with tiredness at the edges, he can't seriously consider resting. He's not afraid to close his eyes, the way he's certain some of those watching over the dreamers laid out on cots in the pokécenter's lobby are. He can see easily where they're coming from, but he can't feel the same way. His superstitions are a gym leader's and a traveling trainer's superstitions. He has ones for contests and other trainers and gym circuits, the weather and the tall grass off the beaten routes and the darkest tunnels beneath mountains, but there's no room in him for false beliefs about a pokémon's abilities.

He's too worried to fall asleep, not too afraid. In the short term, a darkrai's ability is potent, debilitating, and not all that damaging. That changes in the long term, and they don't know how near they are to that threshold where the constant, unabating fear becomes dangerous. There have been verified incidents in just the past fifty years of darkrai killing people and pokémon without touching a hair on their heads.

That won't happen in Alamos. Every victim is being gathered in the fully equipped pokémon center for Nurse Joy, a dozen volunteers, and trained medical pokémon to monitor. And Sudowoodo, the only one of Brock's pokémon who Darkrai's hurt, is a rock type. They can give steel types a run for their money when it comes to durability.

It's easy to tell himself that.

Dawn, who's taking a break from the hunt by helping at the pokécenter, will probably make him leave again if he heads back too soon. To idle the time away, he finds a bench in a plaza still set up with stalls, though most stand unmanned with wares packed away, and strung across with paper globes. It doesn't surprise him that no one there is speaking at louder than an indoor voice. Overcast shrouds the spires of the Space-Time Tower, the skyscraper-sized musical instrument that's the town's only tall structure. In the hazy light, even shadows are muted.

Their traveling group goes through worse than this on nearly a weekly basis, it seems like, but in most of the situations they get caught up in they at least have an idea of where to look for the solution from the beginning. Though Brock would bet something not very valuable against Darkrai being the sole orchestrator of what's happened to the town, he doesn't have any other suspects to offer up in the event that the mythical pokémon is exonerated.

Hopefully it'll only be a matter of time until the actual culprit gives itself away. He doesn't imagine anything that can do something on such a grand scale has any real sense of subterfuge.

He lets Croagunk and Happiny out. The pokémon quickly take in their surroundings, and then Croagunk's attention settles on Sudowoodo's pokéball on Brock's belt. "It's just us. Sudowoodo is at the pokémon center still." Croagunk looks up, meeting his eyes. "Nurse Joy will look after him."

The pokémon holds his gaze for a moment longer, orange cheeks swelling enough to notice. Then he seems to deflate, hunching his back as he turns away. Happiny, meanwhile, climbs onto Brock's shoe to hug his leg, and he picks her up and settles her in his lap. She trills.

Darkrai are exceptionally rare. No one has managed an accurate count, but the League's last estimate puts their full worldwide population at no more than twelve or thirteen individuals. Aside from their strength and their affinity for nightmares, there's not much known about them. This – trapping a town in a wall of fog, keeping nearly a hundred people and pokémon asleep through all attempts to wake them up, bringing nightmares into reality – might be in the scope of their abilities. There are old, old legends in Sinnoh, even, of travelers happening upon villages recently abandoned, the residents vanished with no trace of their whereabouts, and the only creature for miles around a living shadow with a single sinister, glowing eye hovering over a bed with the empty covers still molded as if concealing bodies. Brock can't prove it isn't something darkrai are capable of.

He can't prove it is, either, and frankly he's skeptical. He's from Kanto, the only region with no native dark species. Neighboring Johto has several, but the mountain range that serves as a natural border between the regions keeps them from crossing over. Kanto does have umbreon, one of eevee's evolutions, but umbreon, like other dark pokémon whose previous forms don't carry that element, are famous among people of other regions for downplaying every negative stereotype about the dark element. Other regions' insistence on typecasting dark pokémon as the villains in every story, to the point that in some Johto dialects the word for "dark type" is shared with the word for "evil", used to seem inane to him.

Admittedly, trainers have logical reasons not to keep them. They're the most difficult type to train, even more so than dragons, being unruly, reluctant to follow orders, slow to learn how to behave in human society, and the most likely by far to lethally injure or attempt to lethally injure their opponent in a battle. Criminal organizations favor them for just those qualities, so real trainers who keep dark types on their teams are forced to deal with that stigma as well. All that accounted for, there's no real reason even to try training them – a school of thought that, going by the lack of a single dark gym in any region, is at least some centuries old. Their immunity to psychic attacks is valuable, as well as the effectiveness of their attacks against nearly every other type, but steel types can also resist psychic types to a lesser extent, and pokémon of other elements can also learn dark moves. Breeders generally avoid dark types for the same reasons as trainers, as well as for the extra maintenance required since dark types can't be kept with weaker pokémon, including with their own offspring.

As a counterpoint, dark types are so rarely used that few trainers have any experience battling them. In Johto, Hoenn, Unova, and Alola, most trainers defeated during the Elite Four challenge (or, for Alola, the island challenge) lose to the dark specialist, even those with teams packed with fairy, fighting, and bug types.

After leaving Kanto, Brock's grown to understand where the people of other regions are coming from, but he still prefers to take stories about dark types with a block of salt. An entire elemental type being comprised nearly solely of psychopaths isn't a truth he's willing to accept, particularly since the Miracle Eye Experiment twelve years ago completely disproved it.

Despite his own feelings, though, if this was Pewter City and Brock was still a gym leader, he would be on the hunt too. He would be leading it. It's only relatively recently that people have begun to see gyms mainly as milestones on a trainer's journey. Their original purpose, and the one that League law recognizes as their primary one, is to be a settlement's main line of defence. That's why some small towns, particularly those in isolated areas cut off from the League's protection, have gyms despite not being on the recognized circuits.

Alamos isn't one of those towns. It does, however, have Baron Alberto, which comes down to the same. The title's only honorary – the League abolished noble titles' legal status as one of its first acts on forming – but gyms, back when they were called pokémon schools and were the only organizations with access to battle-trained pokémon, were headed by the aristocracy. A proper aristocrat had to be a member of a school, and a proper school had to have the solid backing of an aristocratic family. Even now, the position of gym leader tends to be hereditary; Brock's own family has been in charge of their gym since long before the League came about. Alberto's family no longer heads a school, but the baron still serves the duty of mustering defences against threats to the town. He took control of the Darkrai situation too comfortably for it to be otherwise. Admittedly, his response could stand to be better organized if he wants any actual chance at killing or capturing Darkrai, but it's adequate enough that Brock doesn't feel pressured to advise or take over from him.

Neither will Brock join as part of the mob. He's of more use at the pokémon center helping Nurse Joy with her overload of patients. Protecting his city from pokémon was always his least favorite part of being a gym leader even when he could confirm the pokémon in question as a danger. If he can avoid it without hurting anyone through inaction, he doesn't see a reason not to.

A beautiful woman to admire would help him take his mind off things. He gets Ash instead. It's a workable substitute. Happiny squeaks a greeting as the younger trainer sits down heavily on the other end of the bench with a relieved sigh. Pikachu jumps from his shoulders to flop on the boards between them. "Is everything okay at the pokémon center?" Ash asks.

"No changes," Brock says. "How is the situation with Darkrai going?"

"It's tiring itself out."

"It's not the only one." Ash is ragged around the edges, slumped against the back of the bench and feet only touching the ground at the heels. "I heard from Dawn that Alberto's been having you hunting in rounds, but you don't look like you've been off your feet since the sky lit up."

"I went off on my own," Ash says, which answers that question. Dawn has the sense not to needlessly push her limits, but Ash has never been anything if not bullheadedly stubborn. Without other trainers to back him up, he simply made sure not to leave any slack. "They still think Darkrai is responsible for everything, and they won't listen when I tell them it's not acting like it's guilty. I'm not actually sure how it's acting. Me and Pikachu find it, it stops running to fight, except the only moves it uses are double team or shock wave – " Pikachu makes a questioning noise to echo Ash's confusion " – before it runs again the first chance it gets. If it doesn't want to fight, it should hide, nothing would be able to find it, but it's… weird. It can't keep going on like this, it has to know that. Someone's going to defeat it, and…."

And they'll likely put it down. If it is responsible, that might clear the fog and return the town to normal. If it isn't, then he supposes they might think it's no great loss.

The vast majority of the trainers in town are Sinnoh natives, raised on stories of Cresselia defending the people of the region from the horrific things in the dark. Kanto has its own demons, but none quite so remarkably obvious about it as Sinnoh's darkrai with their nightmares and shadows and typing, and none that the last century's technological innovations haven't stripped the myths away from and brought down to mundanity. The stories Brock read to his siblings featured haunter that dragged their former human families to the spirit world for not observing the proper funeral rites and hypno that cursed whole towns and ate the residents' dreams to turn the people into hollow, soulless shells, but he's always made sure that they know those are only stories. Hypno and haunter in reality are just regular pokémon.

Which doesn't mean they're not dangerous and shouldn't be avoided on dark paths at night, just that they're not complete fools that would launch one-'mon attacks on large gatherings of people.

"Are you trying to help it?" he asks.

"It hasn't done anything wrong. I've been thinking and I don't remember it attacking anyone when it wasn't attacked first. At the tower, when it gave all those pokémon nightmares it only did that after Alberto's lickilicky went after it first." Ash scratches Pikachu behind the ears. "I'm not sure it really even wants to hurt anyone. Especially after what Alice and Tonio said. Her grandmother was friends with it, and it saved Alice's life. It needs to get a chance to explain itself. I'm pretty sure it knows what's actually going on, too, so if I can just talk to it we'll be able to find out what we should really be doing to fix this."

"That's not going to be easy. Can it speak?"

"You heard it too."

"I heard it repeat the same couple of phrases regardless of whether they fit the situation," Brock says. "It picking up words it hears often is much more likely than a dark type learning a human language. 'Get out' and 'wrong' are the kind of words a darkrai that spent time around people would recognize. You haven't heard it respond to you, have you?"

Slowly, Ash says, "Pikachu surprised it sometimes even when it heard me call the move first."

"If you want to let it explain itself, you'll need to find a pokémon that knows miracle eye."

Ash brings out his pokédex. Pikachu picks himself up and, though he can't read, leans over to watch the screen while Ash types. His ears droop at the same time as Ash's face falls. "Oh." It's a rare move. Brock thinks there might be a dozen species in the world that can learn it, and there's yet to be a technical machine made to teach it to pokémon outside of that list.

Ash can't have Pikachu ask it and then attempt to translate back from his starter, either. Dark types speak the same way as other pokémon do, but human psychics uniformly describe their speech as nigh impossible to understand. What little the psychics can decipher makes them uncomfortable to remain in the same room. Dark types' speech paints them as intensely emotional and selfish, only ever has the vaguest relation to the context at hand, and tends to be fragmented when not terse.

Up until very recently, it was thought to be simply a trait of the type in the same way that taking more damage from bugs is. About fifteen years ago, however, Kanto's Professor Oak solved the mystery of pokémon speech, overturning several hundred years of assumptions and an entire branch of linguistics dedicated to mapping out pokémon vocalizations. Though it's been a commonly acknowledged fact since antiquity that humans with psychic abilities can communicate with pokémon nearly on their own level, no one before him drew the link between psychic power and pokémon speech. Pokémon, Professor Oak found, directly understand intent and meaning. The primary purposes of the sounds they make are to emphasize emotion and just to indicate who's speaking, because most pokémon don't have their psychic ability well-developed enough to locate direction using that sense alone. The discovery explained how newly-hatched pokémon can immediately understand both humans and their own kind, as well as how different species can communicate freely with each other and convey complex ideas despite a very limited vocal range.

Professor Birch of Hoenn followed up with the Miracle Eye Experiment, in which he took a litter of poochyena and raised half of them under the permanent effects of the move miracle eye to render them susceptible to psychic abilities. After half a year of observation, he concluded that dark types' immunity to psychic abilities extends to pokémon's method of speech. They themselves can speak without impediment, but they don't know that they're speaking any more than they can pick up others' words.

Ash switches the pokédex off. "But I have to do something."

What can he do? Create a distraction, lay a false trail, steer the other trainers away from their quarry... but no. "You can't sabotage them." Unity is humans' only real, consistent advantage against threats. Regardless of how much Brock disagrees with what they're doing, he can't advocate for undermining the group's effort in a time of crisis.

A minute passes, then Ash sits up straight and says, "I can catch it."

"Catch a darkrai?"

"And I'll let it go once this is over."

Brock grimaces on reflex – catch and release is a trainer taboo somewhere above pokémon abuse and below gym badge fraud – then actually thinks it over. "That's not a bad idea. If you can cross the first hurdle and keep it inside a pokéball, you only need to make sure no one finds out, which shouldn't be hard. They don't have a reason to suspect. But a standard pokéball might not cut it with how strong Darkrai is. How many do you have on you right now?"

"I have six."

Brock unzips his backpack and reaches into a pocket on the inside wall. "I have three normal pokéballs and three specialty ones. A heavy ball probably isn't what you're going to need, but these fast balls might help."

"When did you get those?"

"I have no idea. They were sitting at the bottom of my last backpack, too." He hands Ash the five miniaturized pokéballs.

"Thanks."

"I can go with you. Croagunk can help keep it from fleeing. Right, Croagunk?" The pokémon makes a sound like nails scraping along a chalkboard underwater and looks back at him. It's a question, not an affirmative. "You weren't listening?" Brock checks.

Croagunk shrugs. Pikachu moves forwards to speak – explaining, Brock guesses. Partway through, Croagunk interrupts him, and once he finishes his piece the rodent flicks an ear and replies at some length.

During a pause for breath, Ash, who has the exceptionally rare ability to understand his starter pokémon to some extent, interjects. "And it might be able to wake up everyone it put to sleep. It'd make sense for it to know a counter for its own ability."

"Is this about Sudowoodo?" Brock asks.

"Yeah. He doesn't want me to catch Darkrai, even if it's only for a little while."

"Ash is right," Brock says to his pokémon, "it's worth a try. Nothing's worked yet, but Darkrai should know something we don't."

Instead of responding, Croagunk walks a few steps away, then stops and looks back at them. "We should get started?" Brock guesses. Croagunk nods.

Pikachu says something else, and Croagunk briefly points off towards the center of the square. "What was distracting him," Ash translates.

It probably isn't a beautiful woman, but Brock's curious anyway. It takes him a moment to find it. He sees it right away, but the lighting's dim enough, and it's sitting so still on the brim of the fountain at the center of the square, that he passes it over as a statue at first.

Ash is already turning his pokédex back on. "Is that a pokémon?"

Immediately Brock says, "It's not a person," though as soon the words pass from his mouth he can't recall why he spoke them so confidently. It's humanoid, after all, without any proportions that are strikingly off. As much as he can tell from this distance, its height fits; he pegs it as slightly taller than himself. And its coverings do look like clothes, if not in any fashion he's remotely familiar with. He's too far away to tell what the objects on its back are, or if they're in fact a part of its back; although some quality about them puts him in mind of the pictures he's seen of greninja with their water shuriken, they really could be anything at all. But the longer he watches, the more convinced he feels that he was right in his initial assessment.

The pokédex's inflectionless voice confirms it: _"Unknown pokémon."_

"There's no type," Ash says, awed. "It's just question marks."

"That shouldn't happen." Even the pokédex it doesn't know the species, it should be able to tell the type. Ash shows him the screen, though, which does indeed consist primarily of question marks. "We might be too far away for the scanner to get an accurate reading."

Ash doesn't hesitate to take this as his cue to move closer – Pikachu clambers up the bench's back and leaps onto his shoulder as he gets up – but Brock stops him with a hand on his arm. "Ash, wait. There's something not right. The pokédex doesn't recognize it. It's a pokémon that hasn't been documented, so why is it so comfortable with being surrounded by people? Croagunk, how long has it been sitting there for?"

Croagunk grates an answer, gesturing at Ash. "Since right after Ash and Pikachu arrived?" The pokémon nods.

"That is kind of strange," Ash says reluctantly.

"And think about the timing, too."

"Do you think it's the one that did this to the town?"

"No, but I am saying it's a possibility. At least it might know more about what's happening than we do."

"What should we do?"

"Tonio studies the town's history. If that pokémon's in any Alamos legends, there's a chance he'll be able to find out something about it. You have your pokédex out already; can you take a picture and send it to Dawn? Alice and Tonio were with her at the pokémon center when I left." Brock waits for him to finish. "You still want to catch Darkrai, right?"

Ash's eyes widen. "I – yeah, I do. Wow, this is so exciting I almost forgot."

"One of us can do that, and the other should stay to keep an eye on things here."

Ash's hand finds the pocket where he stored the pokéballs. "I should go after Darkrai."

"If you want to stay, I can go instead. You'll probably need to lend me one of your team, though. I don't want Croagunk going up against it alone." Happiny chirrups with a distinctly offended air. "Even with Happiny's amazing moral support."

"No," says Ash more firmly, "I'm the one who wanted to do it. I should see it through."

There's no real talking him out of a course of action once he gets like this. Brock doesn't have much reason to try, either. "If you're sure," he says, and Ash nods. "Good luck, and be careful."


	9. Dawn I

"It looks just like in the picture Ash sent. Hasn't it moved at all since he took the photo?"

"That's not too unusual," Brock says. He's not squinting quite as much as he normally would be at this time of day. He still is, a little, but that's probably less to do with his light sensitivity and more because the lighting's just that bad. From an artist's standpoint, it's the sort of appalling that, instead of diluting with time, grows ever bitterer and frothier the longer it's given to steep. Where is its source? How and, in trinity's sight, _why_ is it grey? No crime depth and shading have ever committed can be so unforgivable that they deserve to be publicly humiliated this way. "There are pokémon who can go days without moving to conserve energy, or to conceal themselves as parts of the environment."

"Like hibernation?"

"Not exactly. Pokémon that do that aren't asleep usually."

Dawn takes his word for it, as she's learned to do for most things, and frowns thoughtfully at the pokémon on the waterwork. (She focuses entirely on the pokémon and not its and the fountain's lack of shadow. She doesn't give in to the urge to go on another mental tangent over the lighting, no matter how justified and well-deserved it would be. Even though the square's openness and the number of people and props it's occupied by draw more attention to the lack of contrasts. Even though the improbable half-light is genuinely the most offensive thing she's ever seen. All the rest of the world will forever be dimmer in Dawn's eyes, stained irreparably by the association of existing in the same universe as a sight this harshly bland. But she isn't going to think this, because she is a valiant and magnanimous soul above such things, and also because she'll be here all day if she lets herself get started.) The pokémon looks remarkably human. Ash's pokédex registered it, and her own did as well just moments earlier, and it's not as if she's doubting her handiest traveling companion, but maybe she is. Only a tiny bit. She wonders what the first person to ever see a gardevoir must have thought.

"Did Ash try talking to it?"

"He didn't. Oh, I should have suggested it." He smiles, self-deprecating. "I've known him for four years, and I still keep forgetting that that's an option for him."

"Ash doesn't remember half the time either, just to be fair."

It's a strange thing to forget so often, and so inconsistently. Though he seems to always remember it when he's outnumbered. She suspects that, on some level, it must be purposeful. There's not much reason to talk something out when battling is just as legitimate a form of conflict resolution, and a much more exciting one to boot. If she had the ability too instead of only being able to marvel at it from outside, she'd honestly probably do the same.

"Where did he go, anyway?"

"He's looking for Darkrai," Brock says.

"But," says Dawn, pointing at the center of the square, "new pokémon! He doesn't care? He can't not care."

"He wanted to stay, but Darkrai's more important for now. We don't know for certain that this pokémon's related to what happened."

"You actually convinced him of that? Woah."

"It was his own idea."

"Wait, for real? He must be taking this a lot more seriously than I thought."

"How seriously did you think he was taking it?"

"You and him have been getting involved in stuff like this since way before I met you guys, right? Everything always works out in the end. It's bigger than, like, breakfast, but it's not the end of the world. And it's not even just our group pushing through alone this time! We have a whole town working together. It'll be fine. So, has anyone tried getting close to the pokémon?"

"Not yet," he answers. "Any other time and someone would have by now, especially with this many trainers in town."

"But it's not _doing_ anything, and Darkrai is," Dawn finishes. "Have to prioritize. Even if this pokémon is..." not doing anything. Sitting, same as plenty of the people around the square are, including Brock. Waiting. Watching. "Piplup, come out!" Her partner appears by her feet in a flash of light. " _We're_ going to do something." Piplup fluffs its chest feathers and nods once.

Dawn takes a step, then a thought comes to her and she spins around. "Why haven't you?"

"Like you said, it's not doing any harm. I don't want to give it a reason if that's what it's waiting for. Also, I only have one battling pokémon right now, and we don't have any information."

She takes in Croagunk sitting on the bench beside Brock, then compares him to the unknown pokémon. She's not an expert on this, but human-shaped pokémon tend to be psychic or fighting types, don't they? Croagunk's poison and fighting, meaning a double weakness if the other pokémon turns out to be psychic.

She didn't consider that. Or that the pokémon might be waiting for someone else to make a move first. She was planning to pick a fight and then figure out the rest in media res, like she usually does with impromptu battles, but this is a different situation. It's a toss-up whether a wild pokémon knows League rules, and if it's willing to abide by any of them if it does, and she doesn't have Ash and Brock for backup if something goes wrong.

"What normally happens when a large wild pokémon that's never been seen before comes into a town?"

"Depends a lot on who's around. If there's a ranger nearby, they'll try to put a tracking device on it before they chase it out. Otherwise, they'll just run it off – which isn't possible right now – or

try to catch it." He pauses. "If it looks like it will cause a lot of damage and it's too strong to catch or scare away, they might put it down instead. But that's absolutely a last resort."

Like with Darkrai. It's done something strange to the town, covering it in a fog and twisting all the paths out to somehow lead back in. It's hurt a lot of people and pokémon, too, including two who she knows.

A few hours ago, she was basically fine with hunting it down. Not happy about it, but it needed to be done. She's a trainer now. It's her responsibility to protect others alongside the pokémon she's befriended and trained. That was before Tonio told them about how it saved Alice's life years ago, though. Dawn knows Alice and Tonio are worried about it – Alice moreso than Tonio, but he would be upset too if something happens. A pokémon can't be all bad if it has people who care for it, and a pokémon who caught a girl who fell off a cliff and brought her safe to the ground probably isn't the same pokémon who would terrorize a town for its own enjoyment. It's strange that the pokémon in question is a darkrai, but maybe this one is different?

She wants to hear its side of the story. It's an idea she'll run by everyone else when she joins them again. Even if Darkrai can't explain well enough with words, there might be someone in town with a pokémon that knows miracle eye. Those pokémon aren't especially common, but most of the trainers gathered in town are passing through for the festival and contest, and some of the psychic types that learn the move can perform beautifully in contests even under uninspired coordinators. It's not impossible that someone has one. And, if no one does, Darkrai understands the common language, so Dawn can teach it charades to supplement its limited speech. She's good at charades.

"We can't wait forever." Brock only has one pokémon, who might have a debilitating type disadvantage. His caution makes sense. She has four, though. "Piplup – "

Two figures peel away from the edge of the square. From the backpacks, they're either trainers or middle schoolers. The chatot on the girl's shoulder doesn't indicate either way, since the birds make just as good household pets as they do battlers. Dawn shades her eyes out of habit, and by squinting she makes out three or four pokéballs on the boy's belt. "I'm getting closer," she says.

The wild pokémon rises when the trainers stop about twenty feet away. There's something strange about the motion, a slight awkwardness that passes by as soon as it stands fully. Dawn makes nothing of it, since she doesn't know the species and doesn't know their habits, but Brock, who followed her in edging nearer, says, "It's injured. Did you see it favor its right? Looks like an old wound."

"How can you tell it's old?"

"It's not acting as if it's in pain. Either the injury's healed so it doesn't hurt or the pokémon is accustomed enough to the pain for it to not react anymore."

It doesn't react to the bibarel the boy sends out, either, not even turning its head to track the other pokémon's appearance. The bibarel slaps its rounded tail on the ground and presses itself low, preparing for a leap.

"Aqua jet!"

Less than a second after shooting forwards the bibarel hits the fountain's upper basin and about-faces, teeth-bared, as the water enveloping it falls apart to splash into the pool. Its trainer doesn't give another order. Dawn can't see his expression from this angle, but she doesn't need to to guess that he's shocked to silence.

The wild pokémon, luckily, stays patiently still while he collects himself. The wild pokémon who _sidestepped_ an aqua jet, one of the quickest moves in existence to execute, launched at it from three or four yards away. A simple sidestep without any extra movement, the most economical possible dodge, decided on and executed in a bare instant – it's the kind of reflex Dawn expects from Pikachu or any pokémon on a team that reached the final round in a regional conference or championship challenge.

Still, a single dodged attack doesn't exactly determine the fight. "Aqua jet!" the trainer shouts, and again the other pokémon moves aside as the bibarel shoots past, turning as it does to face the normal and water type once it impacts the ground. The first time wasn't a fluke.

"It's not going to attack?" Brock says as the trainer barks, "Water gun!" It just as easily avoids the focused stream of water from the bibarel's mouth, then jumps neatly away when the bibarel swings its head to follow. It starts to circle, unhurried.

"Yawn!"

"Look away!" Dawn hisses to Piplup, who hurriedly slaps its flippers over its eyes.

The bibarel yawns loudly, taking full advantage of the wild pokémon's passiveness to drag the theatrics out for a long fifteen seconds. Why doesn't the pokémon interrupt it? "Inner focus?" she asks Brock. That would make a little more sense, if it's using a move that just isn't visible.

"Might be," he says, "but it already had time to buff itself."

"It could be following League rules." By them, a trainer isn't allowed to have their pokémon strengthen itself through registered moves before the battle begins. Some wild pokémon follow the same restrictions during trainer battles, though mostly it's only the ones who want to be captured that do it.

"You think so?"

Dawn fights down a yawn of her own as the sound dies and looks back to see the other pokémon still circling. It shouldn't be doing that. Unless it has insomnia, it only has a few minutes before the drowsiness overcomes it. Delaying like it is doesn't do anything besides cost it valuable time. Unless that's what it's after? Why did it show up in Alamos now and put itself in a place that draws attention?

It finally makes a move, rushing towards the bibarel. The trainer waits until it's nearly reached his pokémon before ordering, "Aqua jet!" It's a good choice. No matter how fast a pokémon is, they're not going to be able to dodge an aqua jet from that distance.

Dawn blinks at the wrong moment and misses what happens. One moment the bibarel is on the ground with the other pokémon approaching it, and then the next she sees it's in the air half the square away, shedding water and momentum as it aborts the attack, and the other pokémon's still running forwards as if it wasn't even slightly interrupted. Did – did the bibarel miss? No, it can't possibly have, not at that range and while facing its target. And the other pokémon's not following it. What is –

"Croagunk," Brock rasps, an odd note in his voice she can't remember if she's ever heard before, "poison jab _now_."

The pokémon comes to a stop in front of the trainer. Even at this distance, Dawn can tell the motions are perfectly gentle when it lays its hand in his hair and lifts his face towards it, and that the fingers it sets against his skin are positioned around his eye.

"Ice beam!" she shouts.

The pokémon flinches from the chatot that's suddenly in its face cawing and pecking, and the other trainer uses the distraction to grab her friend's wrist and drag him away. The pokémon phases into mist that drifts away from the chatot. Piplup's ice beam hits it as it reforms ("Good aim," she says), and by the time Croagunk reaches it a thick layer of ice traps everything below its left elbow.

Around the square, flashes of light accompany pokémon being released. Most of the pokémon let out stay near their humans, focused on protecting them if the fight strays their way, but a few other people there are trainers too.

Nearly every trainer Dawn knows about fights wild pokémon fairly, using only a single pokémon at a time and refusing help from other trainers, but that changes the moment either the trainer or their pokémon are in genuine danger. "Piplup," Dawn begins, about to tell it to get closer. Before she says anything more, it salutes her, turns, and charges as fast as its little feet can carry it towards the fray, flapping its wings for extra speed.

The wild pokémon swings its arm, trying to shake the ice off, but stops as soon as Croagunk stabs poison-filled fingers towards its thigh, which is about the highest he can reach. It passes into mist – a ghost type? – comes out behind Croagunk, and clocks him over the head with its frozen limb hard enough to send him to the ground. A staravia's gust knocks it off balance before it can follow up the attack.

Croagunk picks himself up, rubbing his head. Piplup skids to a stop next to him to help him stand while the staravia dive-bombs the wild pokémon. The wild pokémon strafes away nearly into the path of a rapidash's flame-wreathed charge, then grabs one of the staravia's legs above its claws as the bird is pulling up and throws it forwards just as a manectric discharges the electricity building in its mane.

The bird flops limp to the ground at the end of its arc, feathers sticking up every which way. Its trainer recalls it, glaring the whole while at the manectric's sheepish trainer, and, possibly for spite, chooses a wooper with an electric immunity to send out next. It's probably a good precaution, actually. Dawn eyes Piplup a little worriedly. She's seen Pikachu fight and had Pachirisu for long enough to know that, unless everyone involved is very careful about positioning, electric types have a hard time avoiding friendly fire.

But Piplup's known Pikachu and Pachirisu as long as Dawn has. It knows how to handle itself. It hasn't put its back to the manectric yet.

"Piplup, ice beam at the ground!" she calls. It cottons on and starts freezing over the cobbles under the wild pokémon's feet in an attempt to take out some of its mobility. The pokémon starts towards it, but the chatot blocks its way and starts caterwauling loud enough that even Dawn winces. Piplup and Croagunk cover their ears, Piplup keeping at ice beam despite the noise, and the wild pokémon jerks back in a full-body flinch and turns into fog, which is a weird reaction. Dawn's never seen or heard of a ghost type being caught off guard by loud noises before. They're always the ones doing the catching. The pokémon doesn't have eyes that she's able to tell, though, so maybe its hearing is more sensitive.

She suddenly smells something oddly coppery that puts her in mind of blood, though she doesn't think that's what it is. Brock sniffs and says, "That's odor sleuth. The manectric must have used it."

"What's it for?"

A current of water smashes into the fog. Instead of parting it harmlessly, the bibarel's aqua jet carries the mist with it for a dozen feet before the cloud flows out from in front of it. The wild pokémon reforms staggering, and then the ice robs it of its footing completely. It ghosts before it falls and quickly rematerializes upright to block the wooper's mud shot with its frozen arm and take a hail of Croagunk's poison stings to the back, though Dawn's not sure if it even notices that attack. The stings might be too small to get through its clothing.

Brock says, "It makes its target easier to hit and lets moves affect ghosts. It's usually more effective. The aqua jet should have done full damage."

The chatot flaps up to its ear and wails in a perfect imitation of a fire alarm if fire alarms were about twice as loud, but this time the other pokémon clubs it instead of balking. Dawn is starting to wish that Piplup could have missed the first ice beam. The pokémon ducks another mud shot and a water gun from the bibarel and sidesteps Piplup's bubble beam – which her starter stops using almost immediately anyway so it can flail away from the stray mud shot dropping towards it – while the chatot beats its wings wildly to recover from the spin the hit sent it into. Which is when the manectric lets off another thunderbolt. Dawn winces.

The chatot's trainer shrieks. " _Why_?" she yells at the manectric's trainer. "Why do you hate birds!?"

As an argument starts up on that side, Brock waves to catch everyone else's attention. "How about we take turns?"

"Yes, thank you! Get your pipsqueaks out of the way so we don't have to run them over!" the rapidash's trainer responds. His pokémon tosses its head away from him to snort a puff of flame, shifting restlessly in place.

Piplup squawks, offended. "Piplup, no, come on," says Dawn, beckoning it over. It spits a bubble on the ground in the direction of the rapidash's trainer and scurries back to Dawn. Croagunk backs away from the wild pokémon with better grace, and the wooper's and bibarel's trainers call them back as well.

The rapidash steps forwards, firey mane and tail billowing in a nonexistent wind. Its opponent doesn't turn to it until the other pokémon have all rejoined their trainers, and then the wild pokémon stomps to crack the ice while the fires at the rapidash's hooves rise to cover it up to the horn on its forehead.

Dawn had a rapidash phase as a kid. It only went on for a few weeks, starting when their neighbors down the road bought a ponyta and ending when they sold him after a thunderstorm nearly spooked him into setting the house on fire (they were and still are anti-pokéball), but she got pretty into it while it lasted. She hasn't forgotten the numbers – unburdened, in five seconds they can accelerate from standstill to one hundred fifty miles per hour, a pace they can hold for nearly a minute.

It can't go that fast in an enclosed area, not because it can't work up the speed but because it doesn't have the room to slow down in. It's still blisteringly fast, though. She only sees its charge as a red streak, and then it's pulling up and swinging around before it hits anyone at the edge of the square.

By the fountain, the other pokémon turns its fall into a roll that brings it back to its feet. It shakes its arm. Ice crumbles off in chunks outlined by the cracks that spread out from a horn-shaped dent. It tugs its left glove up, reaches under its long coat with its other hand, and comes out with something small and pale. Dawn doesn't piece together what it is until the pokémon slides it without any hesitation over its exposed wrist and a line of red wells up against its washed-out skin.

Dawn says, "It just – "

Some pokémon moves hurt the user, she knows that. Recoil damage is the most obvious example, alongside moves so powerful that they lower the user's defenses, speed, or attack power for hours or days afterwards. Rest is a relatively common move too that puts its user into a deep sleep in exchange for healing them of most injuries and afflictions.

But there are also moves that badly injure or straight-up knock out the user in return for damaging the enemy or for bestowing a beneficial effect on the user or an ally. Trained pokémon tend to avoid them. Pokémon don't mind being told to use any of them – the reason those types of moves are so rarely used, actually, is because of how few _trainers_ are willing to give the order. Recoil from a volt tackle is one thing. Telling a poliwhirl to beat its own stomach hard enough to bruise is another altogether.

Even on a wild pokémon that went after a person, watching it hurt itself isn't a pleasant feeling. It stows the knife away and takes out something else about the same size and color, pressing it to the cut. She swears the thing wriggles before the pokémon pushes it up to its palm and pulls the glove down to cover the wound.

The pokémon's back is to the rapidash's trainer – he doesn't know what it did. Dawn doesn't recognize the move either, but attacks with a cost are invariably really strong. She calls out to warn him, but he's already saying, "Smart strike again!"

The pokémon turns aside from the rapidash and clasps its hands above its head. As fire envelops the rapidash, a small ball of light gathers over the wild pokémon, bright enough Dawn can't look at it directly.

The globe splits apart into dozens of tiny stars at the same time as the rapidash bursts into a gallop, and then there are a lot of explosions.

When the whooshing sounds end and the lights stop flashing, the rapidash is cantering to a shaky stop midways between its trainer and opponent, stark white marks marring its cream coat on its head, back, forelegs, and ankles. Its flaming mane and tail burn close its body, scarlet the whole way through. The wild pokémon is lying on its back on the ground. It reaches up, grabs the fountain's brim to pull itself to its feet, but as soon as it reaches a sitting position doubles over. A second later it wavers into fog and reforms standing with the fountain supporting most of its weight, its left arm wrapped tightly around its midsection.

It turns away from Dawn, free hand reaching up, and then it shudders with a cough. Dark flecks fall into the water. It looks away from the fountain a moment later.

The rapidash's flames flare out, oranges flickering back into existence. It trots back to its trainer, who pats its neck and speaks into its ear as he inspects the markings the wild pokémon's attack left behind.

"It's strong," Dawn says. The rapidash's tail is long enough to brush the cobblestones again. It looks none the worse for wear, even the white spots beginning to shrink and disappear, while its opponent is in a state that would have any decent trainer switching it out.

"No," says Brock. At Dawn's surprised look, he backtracks. "No, I mean that rapidash is strong, but – look at its flames. The warmest they've been is orange, and only at the base. If we're talking how much damage it can inflict with one attack, it shouldn't be much more powerful than Piplup." Her starter preens. She nudges it with her shoe before its ego puffs up too much. "Can you remember the ghost getting hit by an attack before this?"

"Piplup hit it. It wasn't the only one that did."

"The aqua jet."

"And there were others too?"

He shakes his head. "Avoided or blocked."

Any one of those moves it didn't let itself be struck by would have taken it out if they'd hit, is what he's saying. "So why didn't it avoid the rapidash's attack?" The rapidash is fast, but at that speed Dawn can't imagine it can adjust direction very well. If the other pokémon did what it had with the aqua jets, the rapidash might have missed.

"Smart strike can't be dodged."

" _Oh_ , okay."

She's not sure if anyone really has any idea how they work, but the fact remains that there exist moves that simply don't miss. As long as the user isn't interrupted and the target is in range, not invulnerable, and not behind an obstacle, those attacks have a one hundred percent chance of connecting from the moment they're initiated. The user might have been blinded, deafened, and confused, the target might be hiding behind a hundred layers of illusions, and the success rate still won't change. Some pokémon can take the accuracy further, not only striking the opponent but choosing specifically where to land the hit; and then there are pokémon who go in a different direction to reach a point where they can _only_ hit certain areas of the body. Cynthia's garchomp is infamous for, among plenty of other things, not using aerial ace in matches – in the Sinnoh Champion's own words, "I don't count murder as a victory condition." The rapidash isn't nearly as skilled as that, but a move that can't be avoided is a bad match-up at any level for something whose primary survival strategy involves not getting hit.

There's movement at one of the streets leading into the square: the arrival of a group of twelve or so trainers (plus Team Rocket playing at news reporting), headed by a lickilicky – Baron Alberto in the shape his pokémon's nightmare pushed him into. Alberto grabs the nearest person's attention. From the looks of it, he's demanding a situation report from the very confused woman being accosted by a talking lickilicky.

The rapidash's trainer crosses the distance towards the fountain, his pokémon keeping pace at his side, and stops well out of reach of the wild pokémon. He primes the pokéball in his hand, enlarging it from its storage size. "Won't work," Brock says, and, true enough, the pokémon loses tangibility as soon as the capture device nears it. The ball touches ground behind it and rolls away. Without hiring an exorcist, the only two ways to catch most ghosts are to take them by surprise or convince them to let themselves be caught.

The trainer briefly looks frustrated before smoothing the expression over and trying for the latter option. Dawn doesn't catch most of what he says, but she hears enough snatches to get the gist. It's injured, he can take it to a pokécenter for healing, he's a good trainer, that sort of thing. He speaks easily, devoid of self-consciousness despite devolving often into rambling tangents and personal commentary, in the manner of a trainer who's spent too long on the road with no one but himself and his team for steady company.

He moves as he talks, closing the gap between them a tiny bit every few sentences. Dawn's not sure he realizes he's doing it. The pokémon is human-shaped enough that he might be unconsciously trying to get into conversation range. He doesn't look like he's in danger, though – he's still a decent distance away, and his rapidash practically glued itself to his side. With odor sleuth in effect, the wild pokémon won't be able to pass through it to reach him.

When he begins to slow down from the lack of response, the pokémon turns away and gingerly sits back on the fountain, just as it was before it was disturbed. Dawn thinks it might just be taking its weight off its feet, but the trainer interprets it as a dismissal. He startles forward, breaking off from his monologue, and the instant he moves ahead of his rapidash the ghost turns into mist and blows towards him faster than she can remember it moving yet.

The rapidash plants itself in front of its trainer even faster. The pokémon reappears bringing its shining hand down, and when it contacts the ground a column of electricity streaks down from the air in front of the pokémon, like a thunder attack that's been split into small strands from one large bolt, and then another booms down past that, and another, in a successive line of lightning. The rapidash rears up, but doesn't try to get out of the attack's path – to shield its trainer, Dawn realizes, which is admirable but mostly just silly. Lightning is practically harmless. The last three columns in the chain converge on its horn, and it lights up in a crackling blue flash while the other pokémon drifts uncontested around it. As soon as the light dies, it falls to all fours, and then its legs fold as it drops unconscious.

The trainer tries to pull back, but the pokémon's grip closes on his shoulder. It sweeps a thin, tapered leg out to knock his feet out from under him and then scoops him up in a bridal carry.

"Piplup – " Dawn says at the same time as Piplup fires an ice beam. The pokémon starts to make a break for it, but the trainer's struggling knocks it off balance. The beam connects with it near the ground. It only hits the trailing end of its coat, though, instead of sticking its feet in place like Piplup was trying for, and as soon as the pokémon adjusts its hold on the trainer it starts running again – towards the fountain, inexplicably. Before anyone can stop it, it reaches the fountain, twists around without slowing and tips backwards into the water without a splash.

Neither pokémon nor trainer resurfaces.

The first person in the square to move is Brock, who takes off towards the waterwork with Croagunk loping easily at his heels. Dawn exchanges a look with Piplup. Then, together, they follow.

* * *

 _i headcanon that any human language in the pokémon 'verse has at least three variations of "it": for inanimate objects, for living creatures with no gender or a nonbinary gender, and for living creatures of unknown gender. the last two are used without negative connotation for both pokémon and humans. you can also use the last one for people whose gender you do know, and it's not weird or rude. it's getting a bit dated, though. mostly only people above forty do it anymore, and younger people who grow up in rural areas still use it commonly but only for people they're especially close to, like Dawn does for Piplup._


	10. Ash

_Guest: ah! i'm so sorry, the weekly updates were my backlog. the past two chapters i've posted as i've finished them, hence the delay. starting after this chapter, i'll only update on Friday evenings EST, so if you check any time Saturday morning or after and the story hasn't been updated then that'll mean there's no chapter that week.  
_

* * *

Following Darkrai is like following a shadow. Though it doesn't leave tracks, they can guess where it's headed, aided by how little it seems to care that it's being pursued.

Pikachu doesn't rile easily, but Darkrai's continued unwillingness to take it seriously is finally breaking through the barrier from curious to irritating. Ash spots the shadow sliding over an eave, points it out, and his starter's thunderbolt leaves a charred starburst on the building where it hits, then another on Darkrai's red collar while its lower half is still two-dimensional. Darkrai grunts and brings its hands together, charging a crackling blue shock wave.

Pikachu hisses, ears flat against its skull, and doesn't bother with getting out of the way. "What are you trying to do," Ash wonders while his starter absorbs the attack. It doesn't want to fight them, and it's not afraid of them. There's no obvious pattern in the route it's taken, circling back and cornering itself in dead-end alleys and every once in a while inviting itself into someone's house, other than that it's gradually making its way towards the Space-Time Tower at the eastern edge of the town.

He's confirmed what Brock said about it knowing only a few words and phrases, but he still almost expects a response. He only earns the unchecked murderous fury that Darkrai's been giving off since Ash first saw it in the garden (that fits weirdly against how many people Darkrai hasn't murdered), though, and one of the glimpses of other concepts that it frequently mixes in. He doesn't know exactly what concept. Translating pokémon speech has long since become automatic, but he tries to suppress the habit for Darkrai.

He can get an impression of what a pokémon means, but to actually understand he needs to put words to it. It's something he's working on – he's gotten past that stage with Pikachu, and he's trying to reach the same level with Piplup, who's by far the easiest pokémon to understand among all those Ash has ever met. He's so proudly honest that it's impossible to misinterpret any of what he says. Darkrai isn't Pikachu or Piplup, though. Ash can't understand it directly. Which is a problem, because directly is the only way he ever could understand it – the things it says are so scrambled that words simply slide off when he tries to paste them in. In the garden, he got as far as _kill (possessive) going to kill nightmare not will die move bad dream gone hurt not hurt kill the leave_ before giving up with a headache and a deep-seated unease about the pokémon before him. He would still keep trying if it was useful, but he thinks it might take years of practice just to get anywhere close to parsing what Darkrai's saying.

A dozen illusory copies of Darkrai appear around Pikachu. Going by previous encounters, it's going to use them as a distraction for an escape. "We've got to stop it from running away," Ash says. Sparks crackle on Pikachu's cheeks, and he braces himself as he orders, "Discharge!"

The entire backstreet lights up. The indiscriminate attack takes out the copies in an instant. The real Darkrai crosses its arms in front of itself as a shield. Ash is far enough away that he only catches a few glancing bolts, which sting a little before settling into a dull itch that he ignores – he picks up electric burns every couple of hours usually, and this has barely higher voltage than a thunder wave. Pikachu's only going for paralysis.

When the last bolts peter out and Ash shakes the spots out of his vision, he sees that it's watching Pikachu with a new focus, visible eye narrowed. Up until they ran into Brock, they were just trying to catch Darkrai's attention so Ash could talk to it. That's probably what gave it the impression that Pikachu's so weak it doesn't even warrant an attempt to put it to sleep.

The rippling edges of its body haven't slowed; the paralysis didn't take. "Thunderbolt," Ash says. The instant Pikachu begins setting up the path in the air that the charge will take, Darkrai darts to the side, dark void growing between its claws. Pikachu jumps out of the way of the thrown amorphous blob, trusting Ash behind it to do the same, already coating itself with the power from the canceled thunderbolt. As soon as its paws touch the ground, it hurtles at Darkrai fast enough that it looks to Ash like nothing but a streak of yellow-white light.

It slams into Darkrai's chest and bounces off, leaving the dark type reeling as electricity crawls across its body from the point of impact. Ash cheers, and Pikachu glances back to answer him with a bright cry.

While Darkrai's still shuddering, struggling to adapt to the paralysis, Ash primes a fast ball and tosses it. Darkrai vanishes as light into the pokéball's maw. The ball drops to the ground with a _clang_ , shakes once, twice – Ash realizes suddenly that he doesn't have any idea whether fast balls work based on the pokémon's usual speed or if paralyzing a pokémon lowers the capture rate – and then the ball flies open and Darkrai reappears.

Ash doesn't need to understand it to tell that it's not happy with them. Under its glare, he falters. This is the first time he's ever gone after a pokémon who didn't want to be caught. He didn't expect it feel so dirty. Reminding himself that he's doing it for Darkrai's sake doesn't scour away the guilt. A pokéball shouldn't be a cage.

In Kanto, all of history before the Indigo League is called the Lost Ages. City-states rose when refugees from destroyed lands flooded into nearby settlements and fell when a steelix had a bad day. A battle between charizard could set a meadow on fire, and the droves of fleeing pokémon could overrun a settlement, clearing out their crops and eating through their stored food. Settlements waged battles over the slightest resources and territory, and especially for the eggs and young of useful pokémon. Pokémon colonies were destroyed entirely by humans, the pokémon killed and the forests burned and the swamps filled in and the earth salted, for preying on humans or for existing uncomfortably close to a settlement. Knowledge was lost so often that three separate empires in central Kanto, each separated by about three hundred years from the one before, all independently discovered gravity.

Six hundred years ago, a warlord said _enough_ , and he issued an ultimatum: humanity would work together, with each other and with pokémon also, and those who refused would die alone. Through the bloodiest military campaign in Kanto that a surviving record exists of, Indigo and his four generals brought the region to heel under the iron fist of unity and friendship. They tried for diplomacy where they could, but the only state that surrendered without a fight was... either Cerulean or Celadon, Ash doesn't remember which. Anyway, Indigo's idea of diplomacy was to lay down the final terms up front and to declare war if someone suggested a wording change, which had exactly the results one would expect.

After the Unification, Indigo created the prototype of modern pokémon battling. His goal was always to create a new world where humans and pokémon wouldn't need to put their lives on the line to survive another day, and pokémon battling was definitely the purest expression of that wish. Ash recalls vaguely from elementary League history that historians argue about what his primary goal was, whether he did it more as a way to safely strengthen and train pokémon who could be used to better protect human settlements or if he did it mainly to improve human and pokémon relations. Ash doesn't know how heated the debate gets between historians, but he knows how bad it can be between trainers. When trainers talk about it, they don't bring up Indigo or the League. They don't need to. Their beliefs come across in how they treat their pokémon, and for people who are defined by their pokémon, that's all that matters. Catching an unwilling pokémon goes against everything Ash has stood for since the day Professor Oak handed him his trainer's license alongside the grumpy yellow rat who would become his best friend.

Ash brings out a standard pokéball, and Darkrai's gaze drops from his face to his hand. _"_ _Stop,"_ it says, raising its claws in stuttering motions.

He judges the distance, imagines the arc of the throw, how much force to use. Then he tries to overlay the picture in his mind into reality. His arm doesn't move. Frowning, he rolls the ball back into his pocket. "There has to be another way."

Pikachu suggests knocking it out and stashing it in a dumpster until things blow over, which startles a laugh out of him. "We're not all thugs, Pikachu. I've got a better idea." He swings his backpack around and rummages through. Should be the third zipper down... Darkrai sidles towards the wall, but a warning shock from Pikachu puts paid to that plan. Darkrai growls and charges up a dark pulse in its hands. "Won't be a second. Keep Darkrai here!" It's not the third zipper down. Pikachu calls an affirmative over the sound of a thunderbolt intercepting Darkrai's sleep-inducing attack. "Ignore that, it'll be a lot of seconds. Tell me we didn't run out..."

When was the last time he used one? The time with Pachirisu, that's right, and apparently he didn't put it in the usual place afterwards, so where would he have...

He touches lacquered wood at the same time as Pikachu and Darkrai both stop moving. Ash looks up. Pikachu has its head tilted, ears angled to catch sound. _People coming._ An ear twitches. _A lickilicky._

Alberto. Ash stares at Darkrai, feeling as if he's paralyzed instead. They can't let Alberto see it, but if they let it run away now, while it's debilitated, and someone else finds it before them – they can't let that happen either.

Darkrai takes Pikachu's stillness as a chance to sink into the ground. It seems like the paralysis applies to its shadow state, too; it's only reached the nearest wall's base by the time Ash's brain reboots and he says, "Hold it down!"

Pikachu sprints for it, penning it in with quick jolts, then leaps the last few feet and lands flat on its stomach atop the shadow, sprawled out to cover what little of Darkrai it can. A shock is enough to keep Darkrai still. Ash hurries over, picking up the broken fast ball as he goes and shoving it into a pocket, and Pikachu scoots aside to let him sit down, blocking more of the shadow from the view. "Sorry," Ash says as he sets his backpack on the silhouette's head. Darkrai might not understand, but it lets him feel better.

They try to look nonchalant as Alberto's group turns the corner into view. Pikachu's cheeks let out sparks every couple of seconds to remind Darkrai of the threat. Ash hopes Darkrai doesn't call the bluff, because it's not a bluff. A lot of pokémon refuse to attack when their trainers are in the line of fire. A lot of pokémon are not Pikachu.

Alberto's group stops to talk. Ash keeps expecting someone to mention how dark their shadow is, a normal shade while everything else in Alamos is muted, or the fact that it's moving, but the closest anyone gets is a question about whether they've noticed the melted popsicle they're sitting next to. The baron takes in the scorch marks scattered about, tells them not to try fighting Darkrai without backup, and then mentions the strange pokémon they've heard about that they're on their way to investigate. Meowth lags behind for a moment to ask if Pikachu's alright, what with the intermittent sparking, and accepts it when Ash answers that he's going to take Pikachu to the pokécenter to check it out. Nothing goes wrong at all.

Once they've gone, Pikachu climbs onto Ash's shoulder as he gets up. Darkrai peels off the ground after them and hovers in place, not making any move to attack or run. Its eye flicks in the direction the other trainers went, then back to Ash and Pikachu. There's a question in that. Darkrai probably doesn't expect anyone to answer, but Ash has never had a habit of following expectations. "There's something you're trying to do, right, Darkrai? You don't want to hurt anyone. You only fight when we force you to." He holds out the small lacquered box, letting Darkrai watch him twist the lid off. Anyone with a pokémon who can produce spores or electricity learns quickly that cheri berries are as important to have on hand as food and water. He takes out a dried red berry, shows it to Darkrai, then pops it into his mouth without any hesitation, though he struggles not to make a face at the punishing spiciness. He finds a large clump of them stuck together and tosses the whole ball to Darkrai, who catches it out of the air. "They're just cheri berries," he explains as Darkrai inspects the fruit. "It's for the paralysis."

Darkrai turns it between its claws for what feels like several minutes. Finally, it peels the individual berries apart and pushes all of them at once over its collar. Ash doesn't see any movement that might indicate chewing or swallowing or the existence of a mouth, but a second later its eye widens.

It's an interesting trait of pokémon that their tastes in food correspond to their natures. The most accurate sign of a major personality shift in a pokémon is a change in their food preference. Ash didn't know what it meant at the time, but he remembers perfectly the first time he saw Charizard, still a charmeleon back then, reject sweets, its old favorite, for bitter rawst berries it would rather have set on fire than eaten just a week earlier. These days he has the entire chart memorized thanks to osmosis from Brock. It doesn't surprise him that Darkrai enjoys cheri berries. He wonders how it feels about sour foods.

"Whatever you're doing, we can help," he says. "Three people working together's gotta be better than going at it alone."

Darkrai stares at him. _"Help."_

"We'll help you," Ash assures. He keeps his hands open at his sides so Darkrai can see his empty palms. It's generally good practice when interacting with a shy or wild pokémon to let them always know where your hands are. Since he's thrown an unwanted pokéball, he has even more reason to ensure he's transparent about his actions.

" _Are you talking to me?"_

Ash looks over its shoulder, shocked that he's missed someone else standing behind it. It takes him a moment to realize the street's empty. Or, wait, what if there's a ghost or latias or something hovering invisibly –

Pikachu catches his attention and asks for a translation. Slightly abashed that he forgot about that issue, Ash repeats what Darkrai said. Pokémon understand the meanings behind the words, not the sounds themselves. Since the meanings Darkrai projects are practically indecipherable, Pikachu only heard some nonsense noises in its head.

After a moment of thought and a considering look at Darkrai, Pikachu points out that it's probably not accustomed to "help" being said _to_ it. If most of the phrases it knows are along the lines of "stop" and "get out", it might only know "help" from context like "Help! It's a darkrai!"

Unfortunately, that makes much more sense than a surprise latias. "Yeah," Ash says. "Yes, I'm talking to you, Darkrai. We're going to help you."

Its gaze shifts, wary, to Pikachu, who does its best to look innocent and harmless despite being nothing remotely of the sort. Ash is pretty sure Darkrai doesn't buy it. _"Help me."_

"Yes."

" _Yes,"_ it echoes. It clenches and opens a fist easily, no lingering traces of paralysis remaining. Then it turns away, scanning their surroundings until it spots something that catches its eye. It drifts over and says, _"Look."_

It's pointing at a doormat.

"Huh?" says Ash.

" _Look,"_ it says again, insistent. Its claw moves, tracing the shape of the first letter into the air. The mat reads _WELCOME_. If it can't talk, then it definitely can't read. It likely doesn't know that the colored shapes in the straw mean anything at all.

Shapes. That's all it sees when it looks at words. It's showing them the shapes of the letters. Which means it's... um...

"Pika?" Pikachu asks, just as lost.

The only things Ash can think of that are shaped like letters are – wait. _Wait._

"Pikachu," he breathes, "buddy, you remember Molly, don't you?"

Pikachu looks at him, expression utterly blank. Then it blinks. Looks at Darkrai. Looks at the doormat. Looks at Darkrai. Looks at the doormat. " _Chu_ ," it swears. Ash flicks the side of its head.

While they were traveling the Johto gym circuit, they met a girl, Molly Hale, who accidentally allowed a whole host of unown to bind themselves to her. It was an ugly situation. Molly has a good heart and Ash genuinely likes her, but he doesn't enjoy remembering what happened in Greenfield. The power to freely manipulate reality isn't something he would trust anyone with, even a little girl who only wanted her parents back. There were far, far too many close calls. Professor Oak was quietly ecstatic about it once everything was resolved, though. Before that incident, about all anyone could say with certainty about the alphabet-shaped pokémon species was that they exist sometimes and that they don't really seem to do much with that existence. Finding out that they can manifest any wish into the physical world when they're gathered in enough numbers was utterly unexpected, to put it mildly. Way, way, _way_ too mildly. They didn't have any limits to their power as far as Ash could tell. Compared to Greenfield, Alamos is as tame as it gets. A spot of fog? Some ghostly apparitions? The unown in Greenfield created _a second_ _Entei_. "You're looking for unown," Ash says. Everyone else in Alamos has been going after completely the wrong pokémon. "We got it. We understand. We'll help you."

Almost hesitantly, Darkrai sinks into the ground. The shadow starts down the street, gliding at a slower pace than Ash knows it usually takes. Ash jogs after it before it can decide to change its mind.


	11. The Old Hunter III

As soon as you cross into Giratina's domain, the young man you're relocating stops struggling, transfixed by the god looming above. It must be a sight. The first time you witnessed a Great One in person had... an impact. One quite aside from the fists he crushed you into the dust with while you were still reeling. You can't imagine it being different for anyone else. The moment stands as the marker of when you realized the meaning in the spider's words, when you began on some level to understand the sheer, far-reaching _scale_ of the tragedy in Yharnam – and it _was_ tragedy, for all that its actors went to such horrific efforts to present it as malice. Amygdala was exactly as you imagined the gods to be. In the same thought, though, he was both more and far, far less. In a different time, a different life, you might have worshiped him. But you could never have respected him, and killing his vessel was no more sacrilege than watching a mountain fall.

In comparison, Giratina makes for a splendid first impression. Let him look his fill. All the better if doing so keeps him occupied from trying to get away from you. He can't deliberately aggravate your injuries through the padded leather, but carrying a one hundred and forty pound weight in your condition makes it feel like you're breathing through ice shards even when the aforementioned weight isn't moving. If he withstood a nightmare, a limited amount of direct exposure to a god's presence won't push him over the edge.

Wordlessly, Giratina looks away and opens another portal. Your abductee says something short and breathless, then remembers he was trying to escape. You oblige him. He lands on the cobbles with a muffled _whump_ and a less muffled exclamation that has you pressing a hand to your ear, tilting your head into it so you don't need to try raising your elbow past shoulder height. Not that it helps. Makes it worse, really. The veins in your hand are so much extra noise. You wish half-heartedly that your eardrums were fully ruptured. You would be off balance and mostly deaf, but you'd almost prefer that. A Call Beyond did more damage to your hearing than it did the horse, and then you resorted to the tiny tonitrus afterwards – neither can claim the title of the most acoustically subtle tool.

Stars, you've met cleric beasts that weren't as loud as that bird. If Giratina screams right now, you might actually kill yourself.

You haul him up more roughly than necessary in a movement that is in all likelihood significantly more painful for you than him. He makes a sound in protest that you ignore aside from a grimace, and you snag his wrist before he can reach his belt. The child with the larger bird summoned another of the not-Kin (you need to come up with a better label for them, too) after the first went down, so you know the people here aren't limited to one summon. Which is absurd, but you're not here to question it.

He tries for the summoning devices with his other hand. You make to knock his hand away – but no, look at how uncharitable you're being. You're in pain; there's no reason that should translate into pettiness. You let go, let him scramble away from you and summon someone small, scaled and bipedal, as well as two... bats, it seems like. Who, in the manner of bats, start shrilling as soon as they appear. They're not loud, at least. High-pitched, but not loud. Small mercies.

You aren't required to bear it for long. Giratina sweeps the lot of them into the outward portal with a tentacle. It looks at you and asks, soundlessly, if that was what you were trying for.

There's more to the question, of course. Giratina is kind enough to wait for you to understand. It's not an easy process to sift through the word's layers, split them into digestible pieces, and rebuild them back into something interconnected and coherent, particularly not when you lose your progress after discovering you were wrong about it being a question. (Well, not entirely. There's something in there along the lines of _you were spitting blood, do you need help?_ Nice of it to ask first this time.) It's going to be like that, is it? You would sigh if your ribs could take it.

Giratina figured out quickly what you were trying to do. Remarkably quickly. You're impressed. You doubt you would have been able to figure out what you were doing in as narrow a time frame.

Which meant that it had more time in which to... worry? Be concerned? No, something stronger – it was afraid. Because it thought you wouldn't be able to accomplish the task it'd set... but that's wrong, too. Rather, it was afraid for you in particular _._ Your life. Your safety. You _scared_ it.

That's... The moon presence isn't as invested in you as that. You make a show of eyeing the god.

It genuinely thought you might die. It considers you to be fairly skilled at combat, but also that said skill barely compensates for how weak you are physically. Flattering as that is, it's perfectly accurate. You're not much more durable than a regular person. Considerably faster, of course, and your body is constantly resetting towards the state you were in after the moon presence remade you, meaning you can walk off any injury that doesn't kill you on the spot, but you're practically a civilian in most respects. You truly would have died if the unicorn had succeeded in striking you full on.

You're the exception to the rule. Hunters, even those like you who haven't availed themselves of the doll's services, tend to be juggernauts to the level of surviving direct cannon fire and cleaving a body apart with one slash of a saw. It's a natural consequence of imbibing so much beast blood. Vital, too, more or less, considering the conditions on the hunt. Cannon fire is the least of a hunter's worries. You never had quite that much power at your disposal, what with having only participated in a single hunt, but earlier in the night you would have been able to take the unicorn's charge as long as you steered his horn away from anything truly important. It would have hurt, but you'd have gotten up afterwards. And you were only a recently inducted hunter then. The old guard were the terrifying ones.

But you've experience with making do. You wouldn't die to someone who wasn't actually trying to off you, at least, and none of the creatures in the town were intentionally using lethal force. Cultural difference, you expect. Conflicting expectations of what constitutes lethal. And that doesn't answer the question, either, of why Giratina cares. What are you to it?

Before you have time to delve further into the word, the first of the townspeople comes through. Their attention flits only briefly over you. Giratina is far more eye-catching. The god looks away from you, and the local – you're sure they do something, but you've less idea what. There's not much sound. Oh, but there wouldn't be, would there, if they're sticking their head back through the portal to check that it's not a one-way street.

Another follows, exclaiming as she drops down, as well as two of the creatures who aren't Kin, the ice bird and the amphibian. Someone else follows on their heels. You can make out the general shape of the newcomer the same way you can the ice bird's kin, but everything past that is foggy, hidden away in another dream.

It's not a state that lasts for long. The fog quickly dissipates, taking your awareness of them with it, but a human's voice sounds from the same space the creature occupied, relieved and astonished. Meanwhile, the boy, dripping wet and smelling of lake water and something else, returns along with the bats through the outward portal, presumably spots the other townspeople, and starts shouting at them. You bite your tongue lightly. Must he really?

You step out from between the two groups, more to get out from in front of his voice than anything, and Giratina arcs over the path to hover in the void at your back, placing you as a medium between itself and the locals. Also placing it behind you, but that would only concern you if it came from a mortal or if you were fighting Giratina. Great Ones don't make threat displays.

The movements catch their attention. The boy falters, but after a moment a man from the group that followed him through the portal calls out to him. Most of them are watching you. It's entirely unnecessary; your part in this is done. Hopefully they'll be able to reason that out. If not... well, you wouldn't mind another conflict, really. Pointless as it would be. You're injured enough that your movements are restricted, but you also have a better conception of how little you need to hold back. You learned much more about the locals from the one fight than you would have otherwise.

Which is pathetic, of course, but it is how it is. You haven't needed to know how to interact with people nonviolently since you took up Gehrman's mantle. You're a little out of practice. No point to trying to get back in practice, either.

The man who was trapped in a different dream speaks loudly. No one else moves and his gaze is on you, so you assume it's directed your way. You face him out of politeness, but, even if you knew what he was saying, that's the only response you can offer. After a bit, he looks away and calls to the boy with the unicorn, who says something back and hesitantly begins to make his way over, the two bats following above him.

He has to pass in front of you to reach the others. He stops before then, wary with good reason, but there's no going around it. You can't move any farther back – you're already uncomfortably close to the edge of the island.

With him nearer, the unfamiliar smell clinging to him nags at you. It's strong, as strong as the scent of the water. That shouldn't be the case. You're fairly sure the portal opens into a lake and he was fully submerged. What could compare to that? It puts you in mind of starlight, somewhat, but less distant, less cold...

Put like that, there's not much it might be.

You're the one who wants more space between you now. The moon presence is generally lenient with your misdemeanors, but there are lines you don't dare cross. If she catches sunlight on you, even the lingering traces of another world's sun shed by someone else, she'll eat you alive.

While you're distracted, a bat breaks rank to flutter towards you and shrieks high enough to shatter glass.

You fall into the half-asleep state of quickening on reflex. For a moment, the sound is wonderfully muffled. But there's no room to go back, so you surge forwards, meaning that when you pull yourself into waking she's blasting the unholy racket practically right into your ears. You reach for her, pushing past the pain that sears through your chest when you raise your arm. You almost grab her, but she flits out of the way just in time, still shrilling, and tries to sink her fangs into the back of your hand, though your glove stops her. Her mouth is blocked off and the sound should stop, except the other bat's already picked up her slack.

You're not sure how it happens, but there's stone under your knees and you're gripping the ground like a lifeline. You can tell where Giratina is, the bats, the ice bird and the amphibian, a few of the others you fought who've followed through the portal, and the humans you can guess at from the general direction their attention is coming from. All of it should be enough to orient you. That _noise_ , though _–_ you know it's the bats who are making it, and you know where the bats are, but the sound's bouncing at nearly equal frequency off of everything in range, making it seem like it's coming from a dozen different sources. You've relied on hearing as your primary sense for so long; even aware that it's throwing you off, you can't simply ignore it at will.

Giratina intervenes, looming and curling a tentacle in front of you to cut you off from the floating island's other occupants. Then it screams from right above you.

Ow.

Aside from an omnipresent, deafening drone, everything's quiet afterwards. Relatively speaking. You attempt to rise, but your foot slips when the ground pitches and you barely catch yourself from toppling over. Your ears are bleeding.

In the time you've been host, technology has advanced in the waking world. Not that it's affected hunters as much as you suspect it has civilians. Fighting styles have changed since Yharnam – unlike the hunters you knew, the fools you've had to wake up have no unified approach to combat other than the single commonality of hunting in small groups – but that's entirely due to the lack of Gehrman. When it comes to hunting, one sharp piece of metal is as good as another, and trick weapons have the benefit of counting as two sharp pieces of metal. Or one sharp piece of metal and a very large rock. Or – well, the point is that the designs are efficient enough already that it'd be difficult to improve on them. Plenty of hunters don't use trick weapons anymore for some reason, but even those hunters use weapons traditional enough for you to recognize, swords and machetes and long knives and the like.

On the other hand, ranged options have gone through significant improvements. Modern guns' reach, speed, and rate of fire eclipse every firearm in your arsenal. You've finally gotten over your inexplicable attachment to the old models and have started to work on switching over, but the timing has been difficult to relearn. There's also a much wider variety of bombs available. Molotovs remain prevalent, likely due to how reliable and simple to make they are, but the hunters backed by certain factions also carry fun little metal canisters that blow up on a timer after pulling a pin. Or before pulling the pin. Or not at all. Or whenever the stars decide to align. Like you said: fun. Until you figure out how to tack safety features onto the ones you've commandeered, you'll stick to your cocktails. The future can keep its fancy gadgets and suicidal optimism.

Although you don't deny the bombs' efficacy when they work properly. Their manufacturers are creative with their effects, too, allowing for usage in nearly any situation. The conventional shrapnel or concussive ones easily carry enough force to tear through a body. The ones that expel various gases likely make for extremely useful distractions when employed against nearly anyone other than you.

Then there are the bombs designed to stun, not cause damage. The outer casing remains intact when they blow up, containing the force of the explosion within while still letting the sound of it out. Luckily, the explosion doesn't linger for so long that you can't quicken through the entire duration. You weren't aware of that the first time you got hit with one of the things, though. You thought it was a shrapnel or concussive bomb and simply moved out of what you expected to be its range, which you only learned some seconds later was not the best course of action to take. The noise all but knocked you out cold. If you hadn't killed the last hunter from that group of dreamers in the space between its being thrown and its going off, he would have easily killed you while you were incapacitated.

Which is all to say that you're perfectly aware of your susceptibility to loud noises, and, like for every other form of attack, your solution to the problem is to not be there at the same time as it is. That is your only solution. You have no contingency plans for failure. You don't exactly expect the opportunity to fail more than once.

You don't exactly expect to be taken out by friendly fire, either. You really should, with your track record – Patches, Alfred, the doll, Gehrman, the moon presence – but it continues to be a delightful surprise each and every time.

You wouldn't normally count on the Great One who's sponsoring you to keep you safe while you're injured, but Giratina hasn't moved the tentacle, and the last word it screeched painted its intentions clearly. It's honestly irritated with them for attacking you out of the blue, and it will knock out every not-Kin present unless they stop.

(Knock out, not kill. It's an important distinction to note. The Great Ones are sympathetic in spirit, which doesn't always work out to quite the same thing as being sympathetic in practice. You've yet to know Giratina to harbor lethal intent for anyone outside of Arceus, but it's surprising nonetheless to hear that articulated in such concrete terms.)

You also don't have much choice. Until you heal, which will take longer with you being awake, you'll be utterly useless. You can't even stand. Unsteadily, you slide your weight off your knees and sit, peg leg under you and actual foot in front, your elbow crooked over the raised knee. Might as well get comfortable considering you won't be moving from here until the ground agrees to stay put.


	12. Croagunk

_i liiiive_

 _three or four more updates until the conclusion of the movie, i think._

* * *

Croagunk's trainer hasn't been under the water for five seconds before his head pops back up. Then his shoulders, his arms, and most of his torso as he grabs the fountain's rim and leverages himself halfway out. Croagunk wonders if he should give him a hand. The pokémon brings said hand forward to look at. It has three fingers, no grasping ability, and a film of slick and variably toxic slime.

Brock is scared, but only a little. Mostly, he's the blankness that means confusion. There's no way for Croagunk to accurately guess how to react to that. Croagunk can wait until Brock tells him what to do.

Brock holds himself there. It looks precarious. If the opening shuts on him like that, it might cut him in half. Maybe. And he can't see the part of himself on the other side. But Brock tends to know what he's doing, so Croagunk doesn't worry.

"It's a two-way portal," Alberto says, relief and tension mixed together. He arrived after the fight, but he's not late. It is an ongoing situation. The lickilicky leans over Brock, who takes the swinging tongue to the face like a champ, to peer down. The portal's opaque, though. It looks like a thick oil slick. Blurry, formless shadows move in its depths. "What is it? What's inside?"

Brock leans back from him. "There's a large pokémon," he says, clipped with urgency. Speaking puts his thoughts in order. The confusion chips at the edges.

"Is it the spirit world?" Dawn asks.

Piplup falls onto his rump, eyes widening and flippers slapping over his beak as he squeaks a frantic denial.

Croagunk agrees. That would be a problem. Croagunk is very much not equipped to deal with spirits. Nobody on any of their trainers' teams is equipped to deal with spirits. This is why it's useful that Alberto is here now. Croagunk doesn't understand why people listen to him – he doesn't have any exceptional qualities to set him apart from them as far as Croagunk can tell – but they do, and so he has many trainers with him, crowding around the fountain alongside the people who participated in the fight or working on bringing the rapidash back to consciousness. Numbers can get in the way, but they're good for managing unknown situations.

Croagunk would prefer to claim that. None of the other pokémon outside their balls are eager about the prospect of venturing into the spirit world either, though, so in this case they might not be good for anything.

Brock answers with only a trace of doubt, "It isn't. I've never seen anything like this place before." He cracks something of a smile. "I haven't been attacked since I started talking. Some of you should be able to come through." He lets go and vanishes into the water without a ripple. Dawn immediately vaults the basin, Piplup flapping at her heels, and Croagunk, with no better option in mind, climbs up and slides in after them.

The first he hears on the other side is Dawn's raised voice: " – is _that_?" It doesn't surprise Brock, so Croagunk sets it aside in favor of getting his bearings. He doesn't know what he expected, but cobbles identical to the ones he left behind were not it. Paved roads are a human thing. Croagunk treads over to Brock, incidentally moving out of the way of the entrance as Alberto comes bouncing through. The lickilicky might have told the rest to stay put, because no one else follows.

Dawn might be referring to any number of phenomena. The skyless void. The islands floating in it, fragments broken off from greater wholes – over there an upside-down island serving as the foundation of two houses, a thick, twining water pipe connecting it to the next one over that holds only a storefront without a structure. The second portal on the other end of the island they're on, which consists of only a pathway. The creature that the trainers think is a pokémon standing in the way between them and the other portal. The blatantly poisonous purple cloud drifting by beneath them. Croagunk has no idea. He follows her line of sight to the structure suspended over the path. It's grey aside from the red and black bands across its elongated form and the jagged yellow adornments primarily focused on one end. Six shadowy streamers that end in crimson spikes extend from the side not facing them. It's an oddball, but not especially so compared to the surroundings. He checks for Piplup's thoughts on the matter. Dawn's pokémon echoes her shock and adds defensiveness to the mix, planting himself in front of his trainer with flippers spread, but he's no more sure of the reason for it than Croagunk is.

Alberto cries out. Croagunk turns, raising his arms, but Alberto's dismay morphs quickly into delight. He's shrinking. His return to humanity is like an evolution in reverse. It ends before Croagunk has the time to find the idea unsettling, and a grinning Alberto rubs his clothes between his fingers. "I'm back to normal! I'm not dreaming, am I? It must be because we are no longer in Alamos."

That's a reasonable assumption on multiple levels. But Brock's skeptical. Croagunk revises his assessment to take it with a grain of salt.

"It looks familiar," Alberto says, holding his chin. He, too, is looking at the structure. As is Brock. Croagunk's missing something. He thinks the portals and the location and the pokémon who toyed with them at the square should be more pressing, but he's the only one who does. "I do feel like I've seen it somewhere."

They're interrupted by a shout from the direction of the other portal. "Hey, you! This leads outside!" It's the rapidash's trainer, very confused and a little hopeful, dripping wet, and accompanied by a pair of zubat. Croagunk is not sure how that turn of events came about or what it means, but it's highly amusing. He chuckles. This concerns Dawn and Alberto, which is also funny.

Trepidation surges through Brock as soon as he spots the zubat. Croagunk doesn't know what that's about, but he turns a careful eye on the bats. It quickly becomes obvious. They're agitated, and getting more so. They're resonating off of each other. The rapidash mirrored his trainer, so it's not that the human is bad. Either they're recently caught or he doesn't care for his zubat half as much as he does for the rapidash. That's possible. The rapidash is his starter, and there's no competing with a starter for a trainer's attention. But Croagunk gives him the benefit of the doubt.

Besides, it's typical zubat behavior. They can't wall themselves off if their lives depend on it. A lone zubat will stop and think. A pair of zubat will attack a pikachu who they just heard fry an onix. It's not always silly – zubat flocks past a dozen or so terrify even Pikachu, though admittedly he does have very good hearing – but it usually is.

Then Brock's dread quells. Croagunk glances at him, follows his line of sight to the trainer, and... doesn't see anything that explains why. Croagunk defaults to trusting Brock, but this is fishy. The zubat haven't exactly stopped feeding each other over the past second.

He tries to see them as Brock does.

They flutter close to their trainer. That is all. They don't have eyes or noses or, really, faces, which humans use to read intent. Neither do they show other signals, every part of their compact bodies engaged in keeping them aloft. They look like normal zubat. They don't look scared and worried and upset.

Croagunk considers telling someone. But there are bigger things to worry about. He'll keep a watch on them. That should be fine. He hunches into a crouch, gaze glued to the zubat.

"But like," the rapidash's trainer calls, gesturing widely, "you know how Alamos Town is on top of a plateau in the middle of a lake? Not anymore! It's gone! It's like something just sliced the rock – "

The pokémon that brought the trainer to this place makes its first move since Croagunk came through. The trainer breaks off mid-sentence as the pokémon backs precariously close to the edge of the path, leaving the way between the portals clear. As clear as it can without jumping off, at least. It's still _there_. Shifting a few feet over doesn't make it less capable of fighting. But Croagunk thinks he gets the message.

Then the structure the humans have been paying so much attention to moves as well. It arcs overhead, dives, and coils in the empty space beside the path, arching its neck to peer down at the pokémon in front of it. It has eyes. They're red and black and set deep into its head. Croagunk didn't see them before. He gives himself a moment to watch it curiously before looking back towards the zubat. Is it a pokémon too? Since it's not a human, it must be.

Brock is equal parts wary and fascinated, that sharp interest particular to when he sees a pokémon act in a way he doesn't expect and wants to investigate further. Dawn is straight-up wary, Piplup at her feet puffing up and glaring narrowly at the large pokémon – it _is_ very large, Croagunk notices for the first time. Alberto, meanwhile, runs through a gamut of emotions. Coming from Croagunk's trainer and his trainer's companions, that would mean they've seen something they want and are coming up with a laughably unfeasible and embarrassing plan to obtain it. Brock does it whenever he spots an attractive woman; Ash and Dawn reserve it for pokémon, gym badges, worthy rivals, and contest prizes. But trainers are a different breed of human than the rest. They have ambition. Non-trainers, in contrast, think up practical plans.

Alberto is not a trainer. Croagunk doesn't expect anything particularly interesting out of him. Alberto focuses on the smaller of the two unknowns – the bias non-trainers have for physically human-like pokémon, expecting them to be smarter and more willing to converse. "Hello!" The pokémon turns to him. The pokémon doesn't have eyes. The only reason it has to face him is so it can save itself some time aiming if things come to a fight. Alberto recognizes that, if Croagunk's guessing correctly the reason for the caution furrowing his brow, and Croagunk counts himself surprised. He thought Alberto would perceive it as the pokémon following the rules of human interaction. "Pokémon, did you bring him to this place to show him a way out?"

It's not going to respond.

Dawn says, quiet, "Isn't it going to answer?"

Piplup does a full-body equivalent of a shrug, chirping noncommittally. Croagunk glances at Brock and waits until he catches his trainer's eye before returning to the zubat. Brock asks him, "Can you talk to it?"

Croagunk puffs out his cheeks, slowly deflates them, and makes no attempt to contact it. He doesn't get embarrassed, exactly, but he's not one for pointlessly making a spectacle. He's not going to try to talk at the equivalent of a brick wall.

Alberto shouts to the rapidash's trainer, "I believe it's leaving the way open! Try to come over here!"

"Seriously?" the trainer yells, jabbing frantically at the floating pokémon. He throws up his hands, nearly hitting one of his zubat. They're definitely recent additions to his team. "Fine! Only because Destroyer's still over there!"

Dawn chokes and starts coughing.

"Hey, Destroyer's a _great_ name!" He begins to cross towards them, he and his zubat all growing steadily more tense as they near the pair at the center of the island. "It's punny! Destroyer, destrier! I was four! You're laughing at a four year old!" He falls silent, slowing, and stops entirely before he reaches the two pokémon. The humanoid one shuffles even farther back, stopping only when it has what must be half its foot hanging over open air. (Now that it's only standing, its clothes reach nearly the ground and hide its old injury, but during the fight Croagunk caught a clear glimpse of the wood prosthetic. Its fighting ability would already be unusual, yet it managed all that while missing a foot. Croagunk wants to know where it learned to battle. Again, though: asking a brick wall.)

The movement is too much for one of the zubat. Croagunk grumbles a warning and runs forwards just before the zubat blasts a supersonic at the pokémon.

The fight ends before he reaches it. The other zubat follows his teammate's lead, the strange pokémon stumbles and falls and barely keeps itself from introducing its face to the ground, and then the large pokémon rears. Screams.

Croagunk has never heard a cry like it. It stretches on and on, its corpse lingering in the spaces between heartbeats long after the pokémon's mandibles snap together again. When it finally makes to die, it peels away in layers. First goes the sound that from another creature would be the entire scream. Afterwards, the dual-toned echo as if the pokémon has two throats working out of time with each other, the _actual_ echo (though what creates it in so much empty space is a mystery), and the underlying rasp that suggests old damage. Then only the memory of the sound, the truth and the core of it after its material trappings have been shed, survives. It won't allow itself to be forgotten.

Croagunk doesn't object to remembering it. As long as it doesn't do anything else while it's in his mind.

Both zubat reel. The noise ringing through his ears and skull and bones doesn't stop Croagunk, though the shuddering of his rib cage robs his breath, but the spike-tipped shadow lashing down in front of him forces him to a halt. It's wider than he is tall. He can't see the path beyond it. He hears the trainer shouting, a stream of guilt-riddled cursing, and calling his zubat back into their balls.

The pokémon lifts higher, head over the path. Croagunk stands his ground and meets the one eye visible from his angle. Behind him comes the sound of pokéballs releasing. Pachirisu and Buizel materialize combat-ready on either side of Piplup. The pokémon ignores them to tilt its head slightly towards Croagunk, mandibles parting. The mouth open behind them is pink-tongued and real and alive. It doesn't fit on an object that doesn't have a mind, but whatever. Croagunk won't get hung up over something that irrelevant.

Alberto's taken a few steps forwards. "If I had Lickilicky – "

"Everyone stand down," says Brock, loud enough to carry but absent of the forcefulness of a shout. It's a skill a trainer learns when he wants to keep his voice while having a starter pokémon who is a partially deaf steelix capable of encircling a small building without stretching.

"But – " Dawn begins. Piplup squawks a challenge at the pokémon whose pupil is the same size as him. The pokémon doesn't notice or doesn't care.

"It's only a miscommunication. Trainer, did you recall your pokémon?"

"Definitely! Yes!" His voice goes shrill and backs away as the pokémon turns away from Croagunk. "I've had them for three weeks, I didn't think they would do that!"

"Is the portal still open?" Brock says, frowning. He palms Croagunk's pokéball, but he doesn't move to recall him. He's considering it, though.

"Yeah, it's here!"

Then everyone quiets as the large pokémon closes its mouth and draws back. Its gaze turns briefly to Croagunk and then Brock's group. The tentacle curls. The limb doesn't leave the island, still hiding the other pokémon from sight, but half the path is open again around it. Croagunk sees that the trainer's retreated nearly to the portal.

For a moment, no one, not even Brock, knows what to do. He's thinking it over still when the other trainer throws up his hands, swears, and sprints towards them.

Croagunk tenses. He's not the only one who does. But the pokémon only tracks the trainer's progress with its head, even when he passes close enough that he could reach out and touch its limb, and not a few seconds later he stops behind Croagunk, panting too heavily for the distance he just crossed.

Dawn, pale but steady, puts a hand on his shoulder. "Let's get back," she says to the others.

"Yes," Alberto says, eyeing the pokémon with wary calculation. "We can discuss what to do from back in Alamos. Even if it means I will become Lickilicky again. You can tell us exactly what you saw on the other side of the portal."

They climb out one by one. The pokémon only watches from where it is, and Brock, at the very least, has lost all but the barest traces of his fear towards it by the time he recalls Croagunk.


	13. Pikachu

"So, we haven't found any unown," Ash summarizes, and yawns. From his shoulder, Pikachu reaches up and pats his cap.

They're crouched in the storm drains together, Pikachu and Ash and a wanted pokémon well on its way to becoming their newest best friend whether it knows that or not. Ash is nearly dead on his feet. Nothing about this is surprising.

Musty light falls through the grate above, filling in a barred rectangle on the walkway near Ash's feet. Footsteps and wheels set it clanking as they pass over, and raised voices stream through to echo oddly against the water.

There's an evacuation in progress. Someone found a way past the fog barrier. Darkrai's victims were the first to be returned to daylight. Evidently, taking them out of town breaks Darkrai's hold on them. The trio haven't run into one of the illusory pokémon since the pokécenter was emptied. Sudowoodo should be alright.

Since then, the rest of the town's occupants have been packing their possessions and making their slow but steady way out. Movement! Bustle! People don't feel as sludgy when they have a goal to work towards, especially when there are so many others doing the same alongside them. For the most part, taking action's helping. But the goal is to abandon their homes, and there's worry there, too – fear, even – that this won't be temporary. It's a rich, heavy mix.

" _Yes,"_ Darkrai says. Noise without meaning. Not even the garbled meaning of a dark type, because in its shadow state Darkrai hides itself almost completely. Now that they're not fighting, Pikachu's continuously fascinated by the concept. _Yes_ is a word that Pikachu understands, which makes it all the stranger. He recognizes the arrangement of the sounds, knows the meaning that should be associated with it, but the meaning isn't there and yet he can still fill in what Darkrai said. It's exactly the way most humans talk. Stream-lined. Clear-cut. There's a simplicity to the idea that appeals to him. If it's only the sounds that carry meaning, they can talk over long distances through phones and video without losing information, and they can write. It's how humans lie to each other so easily and so often, too. For pokémon, lying well through speech requires practice to hone thought-quick reflexes and mental discipline. Though it came much more readily once he got the knack of it, it took Pikachu years to learn his first and simplest lie: _You don't scare me._ Humans just need to move their tongues a bit. Having first-hand experience of how it all works is new and exciting.

He wouldn't want it as the only form of communication, though. Interesting as it is, it exists by necessity. The fact is that everyone, humans and pokémon, talks constantly. For pokémon, the vocalizations are merely emphasis. But humans can't feel, so they design entire languages out of what amounts to a punctuation. In the spaces where a pokémon finds intent, humans hear silence. Pikachu never had a friend before Ash, but even he finds the idea of ever being so unbearably isolated humbling. He's so, so glad for his partner that Ash has begun to learn.

Ash stands slowly, fighting gravity every bit of the way. "We should scour the town again. We must have missed someplace. Where should we start? How about – "

Pikachu tucks his head under Ash's chin and pushes up, closing his mouth. Nope. They can't go out now, not with so many people everywhere. Only one pair of eyes needs to notice their shadow. They should just take a nap while they wait for the town to clear out. Ash is tired. Pikachu is tired. Darkrai doesn't seem tired, but you never know.

Ash nudges him away with his knuckles, avoiding Pikachu's cheek as he always does. "I'm not – " He swallows a yawn. "'m fine. Unown get stronger the more time they have to work. We need to find them before things get worse."

That's true. What's also true is that if Ash faints and falls into the reeking water, his clothes and maybe his pack are going to soak through.

Ash wavers, but holds. "Piiii," Pikachu whines, pressing against his neck.

"Come on, we have priorities!" Ash insists. Pikachu is extraordinarily unimpressed. Ash grins. "Sleep is for the dead. If you're tired, I can carry you in the bag."

Pikachu buries his face in Ash's jacket in exasperation. The rank tang of the air down here drowns under his partner's scent. He lets his twitching ears betray him, though, and Ash only laughs and scratches Pikachu's head. "Let's keep going through here until we find some place with no people where we can head back up."

They end up coming out of a manhole by the tower, at a long unbroken street bordered on one side by the park and the other by buildings. Pikachu exits first, shoving the heavy plate out of the way and crawling out after it like this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing. He trots a few feet away, checking idly about for people. They're far out at the edge of town while everyone else is gathering at the exit deeper in, so they're not likely to find anyone. He's right, as expected. The closest signs of people he hears are the flashes of pokéballs from deeper in the park as trainers and volunteers capture water-confined pokémon from the ponds. When he's confirmed they're alone, he drops the nonchalant act, scurries back to the hole in the street, and shouts down.

His partner sits on the ground as soon as he clears the edge, trying very hard not to pant from the simple climb. Pikachu nudges his leg, worrying, but of course Ash pretends he doesn't notice. Once Ash recovers, he dries his feet on the ground, unties the shoes and socks hanging by the laces from his belt, and pulls his footwear back on. Darkrai speaks as he's finishing, and Ash translates for Pikachu. _"They left."_

"They?" Ash asks. "Who's they?"

" _Everyone."_

"Everyone...?" Ash's mind is a fog, hazy and heavy. That's alright. That's what partners are for. Pikachu chatters for his attention and tells him what he's pretty sure Darkrai means. Ash's expression clears. "Yeah, the townspeople are evacuating. Leaving."

" _Cresselia?"_ That's the pokémon meant to be the counterpart to darkrai. Pikachu makes a questioning sound. Did she open up the exit? But if the fog isn't Darkrai's doing, why would it expect – _"Will they come back?"_

The haze thins at the edges. With energy he tries hard to feel, Ash says, "This is their home. They're not going to abandon it." Then: "Do you want them to come back, Darkrai?"

It doesn't respond immediately. Pikachu and Ash exchange glances, both of them with questions the other can't answer. Finally, Darkrai says, _"The garden belongs to everyone."_

Then their shadow peels away, and Ash scrambles to his feet to follow.

Technically, Pikachu has gone without sleep as long as Ash has, but he still has charge remaining. It leaks persistently while he's awake, but he has enough control over his electricity to minimize the loss. He hasn't used it actively either aside from the barely notable amounts he aimed at Darkrai. As long as he's careful, he can pull off another couple days without rest, though he would prefer not to. Unless he finds a power source, in which case he can stay awake without effort for as long as it lasts.

Pikachu is not altogether sure why humans and other non-electric types sleep. The easiest way for him to imagine it is that they do charge when they rest and bleed when they're awake. They have electricity, after all, even if it's not much and nothing they can voluntarily use. That probably isn't the reason for it, but it's how he thinks of it. The results are the same either way. They grow tired as the hours pass, and it happens faster if they're active. The younger, less experienced ones have less energy and less practice at using it efficiently, so they charge more often. And nearly all of them require more sleep than Pikachu because they don't store nearly as much electricity as him.

Though Ash breaks the mold in so many other ways, in this he's the same as the rest of his line. Darkrai moves no faster than it did before, but the gap between them still widens. Pikachu clings to his shoulder and rubs cheeks with him, transferring static. "Ow," says Ash without heat. He doesn't stop Pikachu.

"Where are we going?" he asks after a while. Darkrai has pulled nearly half a block ahead and doesn't answer. (It's begun to slow. Pikachu wondered if it would shake them off when they couldn't keep up; he's glad that's not the case. Chasing it down again would be a hassle when it has that much of a head start.) Pikachu has no useful information to offer other than the obvious: that they're heading straight to the tower. Darkrai understands a lot more about the situation than it can tell them, so Pikachu's not inclined to worry. He's pretty sure it knows what it's trying to do. As long as it doesn't look like it's about to antagonize the entire town yet again, he's willing to follow its lead.

When they catch up to Darkrai, it comes to a halt and rises from the ground. Pikachu perks up, ears lifting. He hears the crowds past the buildings, but no one closer.

Darkrai says nothing intelligible. From somewhere among the mess Pikachu is doing his best to wall himself off from – Darkrai's very unyielding, so it's difficult, like hiding from a hailstorm in an open field – he accidentally picks up the impression that Darkrai is relieved, but... not in a good way? Something like that. He tilts his head, trying to remember if it mentioned murder and destruction quite this frequently before.

It expects them to initiate, he thinks. Ash assumes the same. "What are we stopping for?" he says in honest confusion. Pikachu hiccups in despair. "What is it, buddy?" Ash asks him, and somehow grows more befuddled when Pikachu pats his face gravely.

So they keep moving. Whenever Darkrai pulls ahead, it stops and emerges partway to fix them with a bright blue eye. It doesn't really seem unused to interaction. Everyone says it hasn't befriended anyone after Alice's grandmother, but on his own Pikachu wouldn't have suspected that it's not spent time with anyone in two human lifetimes. It's behaving more civilly than plenty of people and pokémon Pikachu might name. It's much more expressive than Pikachu would have thought, too.

While he's musing, the inevitable happens: Ash's sense of self stutters and wanes, and he trips over air. Microsleep. Pikachu clings tightly to his perch, cries Ash's name, sends sparks through his feet, and briefly hesitates when Ash doesn't immediately snap back to awareness. Then he pushes off for the ground. He lands before Ash, flipping to come down on his back, and his partner's face meets his paws rather than packed dirt.

Pikachu pushes him off and keeps pushing until Ash lies on his side, his bag propping him up from falling fully onto his back. Pikachu rolls to his feet and hurriedly checks Ash's breathing – steady, if slow – then scrambles over him in search of an entry wound. There wouldn't be for a psychic ability, but he wants to eliminate what possibilities he can first.

Ash doesn't feel like someone struck by a psychic attack either, Pikachu thinks as he looks over his partner's arm. He might only be asleep. There's been a trend lately. Pikachu pauses as soon as the idea occurs and focuses on Ash's presence. Faint still, but unmistakable once Pikachu knows what to search for: the prelude to a nightmare.

He shocks Ash again, just to make sure, and winces when Ash's nightmare worsens. Oops.

Darkrai is nowhere to be seen. Pikachu rears, calls for it, and receives no answer. He settles back onto his haunches, bemused. But Darkrai didn't _do_ anything. Why won't Ash wake up?

To make absolutely, positively certain, he hits Ash with a true thunderbolt. No effect. He lifts one of Ash's eyelids, blows into his eyeball, then lets go and scampers over to his belt. He noses the pokéballs, wishing Ash had someone bigger, and in the end, for lack of a better choice, releases the whole team.

Staravia cranes his head about, taking stock of their surroundings; Aipom steals Ash's hat and bares her teeth at Pikachu; Turtwig waddles loud and frantic circles around his prone form. Pikachu calls them to order and gives a rundown of the situation. They need to take Ash to the evacuation point, which should break him out of his nightmares as it's done for the humans and pokémon Darkrai attacked. Just follow the crowds. Everyone's heading for the same place.

Turtwig wants to know what Pikachu intends to do while the rest of them help Ash. Splitting the party rarely ends well. Or adequately. Or without a desperate race to the nearest pokémon center or miracle-granting legendary pokémon. Will Pikachu be alright on his own?

Staravia would not mind the chance to get his claws into Darkrai. He ruffles his wings, looking consideringly at the lifeless sky, and coos.

Aipom jumps onto her tail and improvises an animated performance of the size differences between them and their trainer, somehow without dislodging the cap on her head. She also takes issue with the _should_ part. How sure is he that this will fix Ash, and why is he not more certain? Also, has Pikachu tried zapping him? That usually works.

He explains that this isn't Darkrai's fault, which raises the same issues for the others that it did for him. He can't tell them any more, though, and meanwhile they can all sense Ash's nightmares. They should go. Pikachu will catch up later. He's off to look for Darkrai. Ash wouldn't want to renege on their promise just because one of the team fell into a mysterious coma.

He stays long enough to help them sort out how to carry Ash. Aipom hauls his head over her shoulder, Turtwig bites onto a pant leg and drags, and Staravia carries the backpack in his claws once they maneuver it off of Ash and flies higher to scout for their route. Ash is tough. He'll survive. And a friendly stranger or two will probably get involved before he acquires too many bruises.

Pikachu has a good idea of which direction Darkrai went in. Once the others have started on their wobbly way, Pikachu charges down the road towards the tower.

He doesn't catch up to Darkrai until the plaza at the tower's base, and then he nearly misses it where it's taken up hiding in the shadows beneath a tree near the way in. The only reason he doesn't is because the darker splotch starts to edge away when he comes into view. He hurries over, slowing as Darkrai materializes. There are a few people in the plaza, but the area is large and none of them are close. As long as it doesn't move into the light, Pikachu doesn't think there's a risk of its being spotted.

He sits back and stares up at it. It floats and stares down at him.

It talks, terse as usual. Pikachu tilts his head and scratches an ear.

He's perfectly willing to help it still, alone now or not, but it'll need to show him what it wants.

Maybe it's waiting for Ash to mediate. But it saw Ash fall asleep. Isn't that why it left? They stay at an impasse long enough that Pikachu grows jittery. He drops to all fours, stretches, ambles in a circle, returns. Darkrai might have had enough of staring ineffectually too then, because it leans slightly forwards and slowly raises a hand to its head height, palm down. A moment passes. Pikachu watches curiously as Darkrai waggles two fingers like its hand is a biped walking through the air.

That's Ash's height too, he realizes suddenly, sitting up straighter. Where did Ash go? Is it asking that? Pikachu waves his hands at the people across the plaza leaving. When Darkrai keeps its focus on him, ignoring the direction he's indicating, Pikachu scurries a few feet past it, putting himself between Darkrai and the distant groups, and keeps gesturing – with his paws, by leaping, with verbal sound – until the message gets through. Darkrai's head sinks lower behind its red collar, and it turns slightly away, though Pikachu notices it still watching him out of the corner of its eye.

It doesn't make to move after that. Pikachu waits only a few more seconds before scampering over to the tree. He's not going to figure out what Darkrai wants by sitting about and hoping it'll eventually tell him. Darkrai turns to watch as he arranges the twigs fallen around the roots into letters, snapping the wood for the curves. He makes them as they come to him, not knowing the order humans sort them in. After he lays the final line down for the fourth letter, he glances back at Darkrai, pats the ground between the shapes, and moves aside so it can see them clearly.

Darkrai's eye flits over them. _"No."_ It brings its hands together.

Pikachu drops immediately into a battle stance, eyes wide. What is it doing now? Aren't they over this? But Darkrai doesn't hear and doesn't answer, and the moment the rings of dark energy twisting between its claws grow to Pikachu's size it spins around and looses the attack at the sky.

Baffled, Pikachu relaxes from his crouch as the beam flies away. It has an impressive range. The rings' color hasn't dimmed when it reaches half the Space-Time Tower's height. When it finally begins to fade, Pikachu can't tell whether it's dying or growing too far away for him to make out. "Ka?" he asks. Darkrai doesn't respond. Pikachu follows its gaze to the attack still rising.

When it reaches the tower's height in the air directly between the twin spires, the dark energy explodes. It's a subdued explosion, the light dim and the sound nonexistent, but dark pulses don't blow up in any capacity. It connected with something else. Pikachu squints up, trying to make out Darkrai's target – he gets as far as identifying the texture, rippling like a heat wave, and then a dissonant howl arrests his attention entirely.

What comes next happens very quickly: a gale emanates in every direction from the point of the explosion, in an instant shearing through the fog shrouding the town, peeling back the cover from a writhing, oily black sky streaked with false lightning; the haze between the towers vanishes, revealing a large, pale object hanging in the sky without visible support; Darkrai charges up another pulse; and then the thing hovering so high up is directly above them with no transition through the space between. Darkrai and Pikachu scatter in opposite directions as a claw blazing with pink light hits the ground where they were – hits it and keeps going without the slightest resistance, stone dissolving into glowing motes beneath the strike.

Pikachu has never met a pokémon who could benefit as much from a trainer as Darkrai. Conflict resolution! It exists! If Darkrai could have just thought to explain itself to the town instead of attacking people, and if it could have just _explained to Pikachu_ that there was an improbably powerful automaton concealed above the tower instead of _attacking it_ , then Darkrai wouldn't be here dodging and morphing into shadow and splitting off illusionary copies and pulling out what might be every trick it has just to evade the thing's claws, unable to find a single opening to go on the offensive.

With a frustrated shout, Pikachu launches a thunderbolt at the thing's back. It roars as the electricity connects and disengages from Darkrai to twist towards Pikachu. Its tail, suddenly sheathed in several feet of water, catches Darkrai off guard as it turns and sends the shadowy pokémon flying back to hit the wall of a building at the edge of the plaza. Though Pikachu's attack caught the thing's attention, it doesn't give any indication of being actually hurt as it moves to stomp on him. Pikachu starts to run out from under the incoming foot, but suddenly the ground rumbles and the cobblestones crack. His paw catches in a crevice, sending him sprawling. The thing's full weight descends.

It's dark and it hurts and he can't think through the awful, crushing pressure squeezing his ribs and skull to creaking. He only reacts.

Lightning surges. Nearly every spark of his stored power screams outwards in a coruscating torrent. He can't name the moment when the thing moves off of him, only knows that when he eventually cuts off the surge he can see the sludgy sky again. He's not sure how long he stays there without moving, ears ringing and every muscle aching and nothing but ozone in his nostrils, sparks flaring and dying in his vision.

The first sensation to filter back in is weightlessness, air under his dangling legs. Then wind pushing through his fur. His back impacts something solid, stunning the breath from him, and he rolls over and over to a stop.

Wheezing, he pushes himself trembling to his feet. He flicks his ears, not to shake off the ringing but to give himself a tangible action to focus on, staring blankly at the the uneven surface of a cobblestone beneath him. Darkrai picked him up and flung him away, didn't it. From somewhere Pikachu musters the energy for disbelief. It generally has good intentions, he's found out. But it doesn't know how to carry them out _at all_.

He looks up, scanning blearily for movement, and watches the white and black blurs across the plaza dance around each other like confuse rays. A flash of light, a crash and a tremor through the earth. Pikachu pushes himself slowly up to sit on his hind legs. Sparks fly from his cheeks as he charges a path between himself and the white shape. Halfway across, his control starts to slip; he looses the lightning strike anyway, and it courses steady for a bare instant before veering off into a bench. Pikachu swallows and presses his cheek. He's nearly dry. He doesn't have enough electricity left to set up a stable channel. Actually, never mind setting up a channel, he doesn't have enough for any sort of control. White-blue sparks skitter aimlessly across his fur, chipping at his already depleted reserves.

He doesn't notice the person drawing near until she's only a feet away. He turns and looks up as she crouches. She rings some bells. "Aren't you Ash's pikachu?" she asks, and he flicks an ear as he recognizes her by her voice. Alice puts out a hand, holds still until his eyes focus on it, and reaches for his head.

Her palm settles behind his ears, and then she snaps back with a startled sound. Pikachu recoils from her pain on reflex. Tonio, who Pikachu only now registers standing behind her, hurries to put a hand on her shoulder. "Alice?"

"Static. It's fine."

Tonio hesitates. "Alice, we need – "

A dragon pulse tears by half a dozen feet to Pikachu's left. Air flees gracelessly from its path. Pikachu narrows his eyes against the wind, bristling at the energy. It fizzles away a few long seconds later. Alice and Tonio are both very quiet. Then Tonio says, breathing heavily, "Alice, we need to hurry."

"Give me your jacket," Alice says. Tonio does without hesitation, handing over his laptop for her to hold as he takes it off, and then Alice wraps it around Pikachu. He squirms a bit to keep the cloth under his neck. Once he's situated, Alice picks him up, hugging him to her chest and tensing at every spark that makes it through the cloth. Pikachu only notices distantly through the encroaching fade. He stays awake long enough to feel Alice running and see the tower's base growing larger, and to hear her to say, "You're alright, Pikachu, you can sleep. We'll bring you back to Ash after we stop this."


	14. Giratina V

_finals are over and so i rise like a sleep-deprived ghost from the bed_

 _many thanks for the kind reviews! rereading them continues to give me life and it makes me super duper happy that people can find enjoyment in this fic._

* * *

When the evacuation grew earnest, Giratina called on the Distortion World to render more of Palkia's nightmare, grafting new terrain onto the isle between portals to widen the thoroughfare.

Or, at least, that was the goal. In practice, the road is as tight as it was before the expansion because the townsfolk limit their passage to the far side from Giratina. The trainers have grown less shy as Giratina failed to make a move towards them – they've been edging closer inch by inch, testing the waters, though it's gradual enough that Giratina's not sure they realize they're doing it – but the other humans keep their distance.

There'd be a bottleneck either way at the portal into the Distortion World simply because of the fountain's size, but the evacuation would nonetheless be going more quickly if Giratina was elsewhere. The dragon isn't required here. The death trap that is Palkia's bubble-thin nightmare is emptying out now that the word's spread through town. As long as the portals remain open, the locals can continue their exit on their own. The only reason Giratina hasn't left them to it is because the creature it's still shielding behind a tendril from them is reckless and recalcitrant.

The creature's sitting where it fell still. It's only reacted notably once since it went down: when Giratina asked if it was alright to be moved and received no answer, the dragon tentatively curled the tendril in around it to pick it up, and the creature morphed into the false mist so Giratina passed through without contact.

Giratina doesn't know what to do with it. The dragon can't tell how injured it is. It thought of the creature's propensity for keeping still as a curiosity before, but now it's keenly aware that there would be a delay before Giratina noticed if it stops breathing.

Its blood spread bright across the crystal shard that was a window through the fountain, staining the viewpoint crimson before the water diluted it. If the creature was anywhere but in another's dream, Giratina would have reached through and wrenched it back into the Distortion World; as things were, the dragon passively watched the creature resort to an arcane ability merely to stand.

The rapidash's attack shouldn't have done this much damage to it.

Giratina might expect that level of fragility from a pokémon egg or human infant – and maybe not even an infant. Humans make up for with resilience what they lack in offensive strength; without that trait and a well-timed barrage of improbably good fortune, they would have gone extinct like so many evolutionary lines did when the schism put them at odds with beings they were once kin to. But pokémon aren't so breakable either. The inner universes have direct access to the refined cosmic energies that form the Distortion World, and though that manifests chiefly in their inhabitants' abilities to wield said energy, it also leaves the lifeforms of those worlds needing to frequently withstand elemental attacks by others. They've had to become resilient.

It takes as much force to fracture a river stone as it does to cause damage to a relatively delicate pokémon, they heal quickly and easily, and they've adapted to faint upon reaching the verge of serious injury so that disputes rarely need to end with a death. The rapidash might have knocked out a pokémon, but it used nowhere near enough power to harm.

That isn't the case for the lifeforms who exist farther out from the Distortion World. The accidents, those universes. They budded and bloomed after the genesis, after the Distortion World settled from its turbulent birth and opened its eyes and took its first breath and learned to live.

(It forgot again, but that would come later.)

Arceus was proud then. Of itself as the artist, of the Distortion World for evolving past the bounds it originally intended... of Giratina for encouraging its growth.

...In any case, those worlds aren't as firmly rooted to the Distortion World. There are universes just past the inner realms, too far away for pokémon but still close enough to draw on elemental energy, but the bulk of the universes that revolve about the Distortion World as their sun don't benefit in that manner. They rely on it for subsistence, but the core's primary function for them is to hold them stable against the cosmos's pull, keeping the laws of physics Arceus laid down from being bent and twisted and ripped away.

The outer realms don't have even that. The fringe worlds too far out for the Distortion World to protect contend with the cosmos directly. The closer of those only have different types of powers, ones sourced unfiltered directly from the cosmos and as such more capricious and less ordered than those of the inner realms, but those universes at the far, far edge are touched by the dreams of the strange, hungry gods that sleep in the cold and void and the deep dark where stars go to die. Though Giratina has never visited them nor met an inhabitant – it would be a huge risk to take for little reason, since Giratina's power wanes drastically away from the Reverse World – it has fought things from the cosmos that encroaches on them. They've left a less than stellar impression.

This creature comes from one of those worlds without pokémon. Giratina saw the creature use one ghost-like ability and immediately forgot what its origin implies. Its home can't be too far from the Distortion World if it can use elemental power (Giratina brushes off again the idea that it might instead be from the outer realms), but it's far enough. It's not as durable as a pokémon.

The creature turns its head up as Giratina's narration of the evacuation slows. (Most things learn to speak by being spoken to. Giratina, who hasn't given up its hope of hearing the creature's own voice, has been speaking soundlessly and continuously since the trainers backed off.)

The dragon asks if the creature is going to die. Giratina watches its covered face, wondering what the dragon is meant to be searching for. Then the creature dissolves into mist, billows up and reforms standing – staggers, and Giratina curls its tendril closer for the creature to steady itself on.

The reaction isn't an answer, but it's as close to one as Giratina will find here. And it's been so long since Giratina has had something to talk to.

The creature keeps on its feet, if unsteadily. It starts to tip over more than once, though it doesn't fall – when it can't catch itself in time, it breaks apart long before it reaches the ground and comes back together with a hand sunk partway into Giratina's half-solid essence.

Disorientation from a zubat's voice doesn't tend to last this long. But that's for pokémon and the local humans. For all Giratina knows, the creature might stay this way forever. It might worsen.

Giratina's the one who asked for it to go into town. The creature might have agreed, but the dragon doesn't imagine it could have known fully what it'd be facing. Giratina dips its head down a little closer to the island, though it keeps from drawing the tendril any farther inwards since that would affect the creature's footing.

One of the trainers, the one who sent its croagunk against the creature, makes the leap to initiating contact. Giratina fixes its eyes on the human shuffling cautiously closer. The trainer has its hands visible at its sides, its movements are careful but not exaggerated to caricature, and it keeps up an unbroken stream of chatter in one of the tones Giratina hears trainers use around large, temperamental pokémon who aren't yet showing signs of irritation.

There are a few of those tones. This is the least wary of them. Giratina's worshipers told it several times that the main emotion behind it is reverence, but, since they passed, it's been habit for the dragon to scale that down to awe instead.

The trainer stops long before it reaches Giratina – at, Giratina notes, nearly exactly the distance before an onix, with their far-sighted vision, would start to have trouble seeing it – and then it reaches for its pocket. It slows every few seconds, waiting in case Giratina objects, until it holds its hand out and peels its fingers back from a handful of blue berries.

Giratina forgot about those completely. Oran berries have a healing effect. While they're not as strong as sitrus berries, the amount the trainer is offering would be enough to bring nearly any pokémon back from the brink of death. But the creature isn't a pokémon. The berries might help, or they might do worse.

Giratina tells the creature so, then waits for a response. Enough time passes that the trainer makes to stow the berries away, though it stalls when Giratina glances its way again. Most mortals are finicky about time; for good reason, and Giratina accommodates when it can, but in this case it appreciates the trainer's patience.

All the warning the dragon receives is the creature's tightening its grip on the tendril. Then the creature dissolves, flows through the shadowy limb, and reforms on the other side of the barricade Giratina made with its tentacle, still with its back and one hand on the appendage for balance.

The trainer glances away from Giratina to address the creature. Giratina recognizes the cadence of a friendly greeting before it's lost in the rest of the trainer's speech. The creature doesn't react to the words, not even with the faint shifts in tension that happen when it's listening to Giratina, and the trainer doesn't give any indication of expecting it to. Then the trainer starts to approach. Its narrow gaze flits to Giratina more often as it walks nearer, though that's the one sign it betrays of its caution. Its pace doesn't slow, its tone doesn't waver, and its free hand stays away from the three pokéballs at its waist.

It stops the instant the creature moves. The creature pushes away from Giratina and crosses the rest of the distance to the trainer. It's still visibly unsteady, but it looks less in danger of tipping over than it did a few hours earlier; either it's quick to heal or quick to learn how to compensate for injuries, and either way Giratina feels even more guilty about the whole debacle.

It extends a hand. The trainer looks briefly surprised, but it tips the berries into the creature's palm.

As soon as they've been passed over, the creature takes several steps back, then bows with one arm bent in front of itself and the other angled back. It's such a human gesture that Giratina doesn't immediately recognize it in the context, not until the trainer mirrors it with less flourish and starts speaking rapidly as soon as it straightens.

The creature ignores it, returning to Giratina as mist and leaning against the tendril again as it rolls the berries between its fingers. Giratina leans over it while it lifts the berries to its mask – to scent them, not to eat.

The trainer backs away soon enough and returns through the town-side portal to help the people who have trouble climbing the fountain, but the interaction encourages others. Another six trainers follow its example in quick succession.

The last of those is the one who sent its piplup against the creature. The trainer shoves the piplup forwards with a hand on its back, and the pokémon struts up to the creature (who shrinks back by a near-imperceptible distance) and stabs a flipper at it in what Giratina recognizes as an attempted handshake.

A still second passes. The pokémon waggles its flipper pointedly, glaring up.

Giratina is about to intervene, but the trainer breaks the impasse first with an exasperated noise and calls for the pokémon. It's not until the trainer repeats the order, though, that the piplup moves, and then it snaps its flipper back, spins away with its beak in the air, and strolls back to let itself be picked up by its trainer.

The human lingers, gaze flicking between Giratina and the creature; then it waves, and the pair return to help with guiding the evacuation.

Telling what the creature is feeling is never easy, but Giratina is always putting quite a bit of effort into trying. Though the dragon can't piece together what or why, something changes after the piplup. The next trainers to introduce themselves receive even more passive responses. When the pair of small trainers with the bibarel and chatot approach, the creature drifts back behind Giratina's tentacle before they arrive, voluntarily hiding itself from the townspeople's view.

The evacuation goes on for most of a day. It's smooth aside from spots of minor trouble. Giratina draws some alarm each time it bats away a cloud of pollution that draws too near. Those people helping to direct the flow of traffic occasionally are called out of the Distortion World and don't return for some hours. More than a few people try to bring along too many possessions and have trouble fitting through the fountain, which Giratina resolves by opening larger portals wherever the town's infrastructure allows.

Now that the townspeople know the dragon is helping, it doesn't take them long to figure out for themselves where the new passages open to and what they exist for. Giratina's trusted, with some reservations. Common ground is easier to find when there's nothing so complicated as a shared language getting in the way.

If either side could speak to the other, Giratina thinks the townspeople would ask _why_ , and the tentative trust would fracture when the dragon... Giratina might try, but it knows from experience how limiting physical languages are, how many words it would take to fail to describe Giratina's relationship with its siblings. As things stand, though: Giratina offers them aid, and they can choose whether or not to accept. A yes/no question, a transaction, the basest form of peaceful interaction.

Something like a crude settlement gradually forms beside the lake, growing outwards in both directions along the shore as the hours pass. Some birds take off and some wild aquatic pokémon swim away once they're released to safety, a dozen or so humans hike up to the road that leads away from the town – but the vast majority stay. People set up shade, organize food and water distribution, and then they sit on the ground or on their belongings, and they wait.

There's hope still that their home might be returned to them. They don't understand the truth of what's happened. Once the town empties and Giratina closes the portals, perhaps some of them will chance upon a path back to it through their dreams. But this is the last they'll ever see of it in waking. Until they understand that, they can only wait.

No longer trapped in Palkia's nightmare, those who possess communication devices lend to those don't. Family, friends, authorities are contacted. Come evening, when Giratina's view ports blaze orange and amaranth, a piece of the world from outside the town arrives.

A togekiss and a garchomp alight at the outskirts of the evacuees' camp. One of the three human riders recalls the togekiss while the townspeople press in enthusiastically. Only the deterrent of the garchomp keeps them from swarming the newcomers. Shouting, general excitement; pokémon feel the energy and add their voices to the hubbub.

Then the togekiss's trainer steps forwards. It doesn't speak loudly, and it doesn't project its voice well (the window only conveys light, not sound, but Giratina can feel how the air moves in the other universe), but with the first word those at the front of the crowd, the people who can see the mouth move, turn and hush those behind them, and those behind them turn and echo the notion.

Quiet ripples out from the epicenter until the newcomer's even tone is only competing against the voices and movements of those too far away to have noticed the arrival.

As the words hold no meaning to Giratina, it flicks its attention to the garchomp instead. Mortal dragons don't tend to take well to crowds, particularly crowds not of their own lines. This one seems an exception. It pays no attention to either the trainer or any of the people around them. Its eyes rove above the crowd, avoiding them to take in the rest of the evacuees' camp beyond them, and then its gaze settles on the portal in the water and doesn't shift away.

The speaker might well have forgotten the pokémon's existence. The other human newcomers glance at the dragon occasionally – not wary, but needing affirmation for them to remain unwary.

The presentation's not as interesting to watch as the evacuation has been. Monologues rarely are. The speaker finishes its part and begins calling volunteers from the crowd to, presumably, tell it more about the situation. Giratina returns to surveying the townspeople still trickling in through the fountain plaza.

The steady flood has ended. There are stretches now when this part of the Distortion World is empty again but for Giratina and the creature. Only the stragglers remain, passing through in fits and starts – the ones who needed assistance reaching a portal, the ones most reluctant to leave their homes and belongings, the ones who slept through the day and were only recently made aware of any such thing as an evacuation.

Or, as it goes, have still not been made aware.

The next to stumble out of town is the piplup's trainer (the creature tips its head faintly back when Giratina says as much), staggering under the weight of an aipom and a sleeping human on its back. A staravia circles close enough to send its hair gusting into its face, and a turtwig mills about its feet and trips it.

While the piplup tackles the turtwig with a squawk, the trainer picks itself up. The other human it was carrying stirs with a groan, and the aipom leaves off of playing with its hat to start chattering at it.

The piplup's trainer arranges itself cross-legged on the ground and speaks, beckoning with a hand.

The turtwig kicks the piplup off, and the bird flaps to its feet and over to its trainer. For some reason, a shouting match starts up between the human and piplup.

Giratina hasn't the slightest idea what just happened.

The staravia and aipom and turtwig pile onto the other human, who tries to hug them and keep them from bowling it over at the same time. That goes as well as expected. From the ground and under the weight of three pokémon trying to smother it under fur and feathers and saliva, it adds it own voice to the yelling until the piplup and other trainer notice and immediately break from their argument.

The piplup's trainer crawls hurriedly over to sit next to them – the piplup follows with less urgency – and a long conversation follows.

At one point, the piplup's trainer waves a hand in Giratina's direction, and the other trainer follows with its gaze and proceeds to react predictably. For the most part. Once the loud, flailing shock passes and it's exchanged a few more lines with the other trainer, it doesn't even slightly hesitate before it sprints to Giratina to exclaim over the dragon from up close. Giratina peers down at it, and it beams up at the dragon. Bold little thing.

It doesn't stay for long. The other trainer calls for its attention, and, after some conferring, they and their pokémon head back into town in a hurry, the staravia's trainer recalling its ground-bound pokémon before it climbs through the portal. Through a viewing crystal, Giratina tracks them as they take off into the streets, following the staravia guiding them overhead, and –

– the crystal ripples.

Palkia's rage resounds through the thin, porous wall between worlds, shreds the ceiling of its dream, tears away the fog blanket and reveals the roiling, storm-lashed foundation it constructed the nightmare upon.

Giratina sees the trainers stumble and nothing more – it's already turning its attention away to skim the other crystal bubbles shimmering into existence around it. The crystals are its only line through. The nightmare is a creation of Palkia's rather than an offshoot of the multiverse's origin – the realm is connected to the Distortion Word only through several degrees of removal, through the faint and fraying tether between town and the physical space it once occupied, a tenuous enough link that Giratina can't sense directly the happenings inside.

The window that showed Palkia in its rest is empty now, nothing but blank sky and the tower's spire. Giratina shifts it aside and searches the surroundings for movement, tension building in the dragon's frame. Palkia shouldn't have healed yet. What happened? What woke it up? The nightmare still has other occupants, and Palkia is awake and moving and in there with them...

A flash of pearl.

Giratina immediately dissolves the crystals reflecting other parts of the town and brings up every reflection it can of the area around the twin-spired tower.

It spots the white dragon from a distance, through a faded reflection off a glass pane high up in the tower.

Its siblings is pursuing a familiar silhouette. Giratina whistles in surprise. _Darkrai._

(It's the first word Giratina has accompanied with sound since it told the zubat to stop their attack. The creature straightens some where it's leaning with its back to Giratina's tentacle.

The dragon was old when the Distortion World wove into coherence the second true universe. A mortal who could hear its speech would need no less than centuries of devotion to understand the full meaning of the word it spoke: its definition of _darkrai_ , as with most of its words, traces lineage and history back to a time before time. But in the very first layer past the surface, where one might need only some days to reach, a meaning to glean is _lost, ill thought of my creator_.)

Palkia is _fighting_. Giratina draws the crystal closer with a tentacle, not out of a need but entirely out of a restless desire to move, tracking with its eyes the shapes and attacks flitting through the space below.

Palkia's claws carve a scar into the ground after a missed strike. Glittering mist lifts from the gouges. Giratina lingers over the sight, trying to place the aftereffect with the attack that might cause it – and so it sees the trenches slowly and steadily widening, the rising mist a constant despite Palkia having long since vacated the space. Giratina nearly recoils.

That's not an attack.

What is Palkia thinking? Is it thinking at all?

Gold-tinged light surges, lightning to force even Palkia to take notice if it connects; which it does, and Palkia finally focuses enough on its surroundings to bat the darkrai away like a mere irritant (telling Giratina all the dragon needs to know about the dark type's age) before rounding on the bolt's source with a wordless howl.

The bolt's source is a pikachu. The rodent is unusually powerful for its kind, likely a trained one even if its trainer is currently nowhere in sight, but it's still a pikachu, and several of Giratina's spikes ram down into the floating path between the portals as Palkia turns to the tiny creature with violence in its stance.

Palkia very rarely moves. Instead, it repositions the rest of the universe using itself as the reference point. In battles, it doesn't aim. It attacks, and its targets discover, generally to their confusion, that they exist in the line of fire. Missing becomes a possibility only in exceptional circumstances – such as when the opponent is a darkrai and the battlefield a nightmare.

This darkrai is a recent escapee, its raw talent negated by inexperience. It has a theoretically nigh-unassailable terrain advantage and not the learning to put that into practice.

Inexperienced as it is, though, it at least knows enough to prevent Palkia's most frequent and casual spacial manipulations. The nightmare stays put and Palkia moves through it, not the other way around. The pikachu has a chance of avoiding Palkia's retaliation.

Then a sand-hued glimmer ripples through the jewels in Palkia's shoulders. Giratina thrashes its tail and wrenches its spikes back, dragging the points screeching over worked stone, as Palkia splits the earth under the rodent, trips the rodent, and destroys its chance.

A tendril slashes through the crystal, shattering the reflection before Palkia can move aside and reveal the smear of fur and viscera that was a life.

Enough. Giratina cannot enter the nightmare, but it will do more than watch now that Palkia's awoken and time is short. Palkia somehow doesn't care that its sanctuary, the flimsiest working Giratina has ever seen from it, is coming apart around it. The dream's integrity is so poor that it breaks into mist at the slightest motions from its creator. But, for as long as there are people inside, Giratina needs to keep its sibling's paper-thin nightmare from tearing.

Giratina doesn't know what the darkrai's stake is, when it arrived in the town, or what it thinks it's doing. (With young darkrai, there's a vital distinction to make between what they think they're doing and what they are in fact doing). But none of that matters. The dark type is keeping Palkia occupied. Giratina can use the minutes it's risking its life for.

The creature has not moved since Giratina spotted the darkrai. Giratina asks if it wants to come along. Seeing the darkrai reminded the dragon – it knows someone able and willing to hold the seams of a fraying nightmare together. All that matters is to find it. At this time of year – the season on the planet is spring, isn't it? early spring – it should be either on its island or at the human settlement across the channel from the island.

The dragon curls the tendril the creature is leaned against around it.

The creature phases, letting the ectoplasm pass through, and Giratina takes it for an answer.

Giratina won't be long, it tells the creature – but, nonetheless, if something happens, if the locals give the creature trouble again, the Distortion World is Giratina's. The dragon will know.

The creature sets its fingers over its eye covering. Giratina waits a fraction of a second in case it means to do more, but it doesn't move again, and so the dragon twists away from the portals and dives.

Its realm bends around it. The distant stars spin. It hurtles through a cloud of Palkia and Dialga's pollution, and when it comes out on the other side it twines itself around a window that peers through the pond on Newmoon Island.

Trees. Clouds. The darkrai who resides there is absent.

The town, then. Giratina sifts through the settlement shadow by shadow, hoping Darkrai isn't in a dream.

Partway through, something happens. A small thing, but Giratina's specifically paying attention in that direction. The dragon pauses.

It thins itself out so the Distortion World can thread into the hollows it makes, and then it asks for confirmation, which its realm offers to it with a distinctly apologetic air.

Hardly the Distortion World's fault. Still, Giratina rushes back the way it came, abandoning the search, and when it comes up on the path to Palkia's nightmare it loops a circle around the stones first, as if the creature might be clinging to the underside for the dragon to spot. It is not, any more than it's still standing where Giratina last saw it.

Forget Palkia's shoulder. If Palkia hurts the creature, Giratina thinks, then Giratina will rip its entire arm off.

The dragon calls up viewports, banishes just as quickly the ones that don't immediately show movement, and brings out more to replace them. The streets are empty aside from dust and the belongings lost or left behind on the way out, which makes things easier; it doesn't take long for Giratina to spot what it's looking for.

The creature entered the town through the portal that lets out closest to the tower, the Distortion World told Giratina as much. There are only a few reasons it might have chosen that entrance, but Giratina was still holding out hope that it went the wrong way.

If it did choose the wrong path, though, it's certainly very confident about it. It's closing the scant distance to the tower via a headlong sprint.

It seems pretty well recovered from its earlier injuries, though as it suddenly stops running Giratina notices a stiffness, certain common limb positionings that it takes care to avoid. Bad enough that it's going to confront Giratina's kin, but it's going to add being injured to the mix because the odds aren't stacked far enough yet.

Giratina can't interfere; the construct that took the town might be the thinnest excuse for a nightmare Giratina can imagine existing, but it is still, technically speaking, Palkia's dream. Giratina can't violate it. Palkia's suffered through enough of that already, besides.

There are no proxies Giratina can send in on its own behalf. Darkrai isn't in the physical space of the town or the island (not unless it's inhabiting the darkness of something's bowels – Giratina's never known it to do so, though, despite its being capable of it), Giratina doesn't know where to look for it, and it knows no one else capable of helping on this matter. Cresselia could find Darkrai easily, linked as they are to each other by the ceremony that made Cresselia, but the problem there comes down, as ever, to time and communication. Cresselia might know where Darkrai is, but it has no method to tell Giratina, and showing the dragon would take it too long since it can't teleport.

Giratina's only been as powerless a few times in its life, and it's grown no fonder of the feeling for its absence.

Then the creature, for no apparent reason, tilts its head towards the reflective surface Giratina is using for a window. A pocket mirror, fallen to the ground and forgotten as its owner left the nightmare. The creature alters its course.

The perspective through the window slides, the creature shifting out of view as it picks up the mirror and turns the face away. Giratina leans in, briefly entertaining the thought of opening a portal using it; but the creature couldn't fit through a passage of that size.

Why pick up the mirror? Though, as long as it's doing that, it's not getting closer to Palkia. It's stopped moving. Giratina supposes the reason doesn't much matter, as long as it holds...

The window fades.

Giratina leans in, curling a tendril around the shattered reflection as if that will keep it intact, but the link is broken, because the creature broke it. Why would it – ? No, Giratina can guess. It knows Giratina sees through reflections, liquid and polished glass and whatever the dragon can game the Distortion World into acknowledging as reflective, and Giratina can think of no other reason why it would go out of its way to destroy a mirror lying harmless on the ground. It's sending a message through the weave between worlds.

The only times Giratina can (almost) understand its meaning are those when it's pushing the dragon away.

Giratina nearly let it succeed before, when it drew blood, but Giratina has a better grasp on the lay of the land now. It won't let the creature cage itself in again.

The dragon curls in around itself and coalesces windows through other reflections into Palkia's nightmare. It's older than the star the town's planet turns around, but it knows of no one to call on for aid and cannot itself enter its sibling's dream. There's nothing for the dragon to do but watch, but that one small thing, at least, it won't be denied.

* * *

 _if you're curious what the multiverse as Giratina described it actually looks like, fear not for i constructed a Fun Visual in Paint (16 spaces and 4 underscores to delete from the link):_ _66 . media . tumblr . _c_o_m_ / 3057089a9e 0eef63e9776fd 7ca8b1334 / tumblr_pr mq3lVK6C1y om1too1_1280 . png_

 _also, in case anyone is concerned: Alamos' fate here will not be a word-for-word copy of Alamos' fate in the movie.  
_


	15. The Old Hunter IV

You don't get along with mirrors. You drop the empty frame unceremoniously atop its nest of glass shards and then start back towards the fighting.

The town is dead silent. Only your uneven footsteps and the screams of Palkia's attacks, growing quickly louder as the distance closes. Combined with the detritus on the ground, the lost remnants of lives, you could imagine yourself somewhere else if you wanted. Things are different here, but not in all the ways that matter. You settle into old patterns like a hand fitting into the grooves on a saw's worn hilt.

That's your benefactor's sibling you're going to do your damndest to kill. Best if it's not watching.

Not that you can really stop Giratina, but it doesn't hurt you at the moment to try.

(You don't expect to succeed in killing Palkia, either; only, from the way Giratina talks about it, you might not be able to hurt it at all if you attempt any less.)

You keep expecting Giratina to take poorly to your actions, and it keeps bucking that expectation, but there has to be a limit to what it's willing to tolerate from you. That's been nagging at you, not being able to name where the line stands. It's the sort of thing you should know. You've pushed and you've pushed and yet the Sword of Damocles still hangs suspended over your head, unwilling to fall.

If you pulled against the moon presence half the nonsense you've done to Giratina, she'd... Going against a direct order, severing something like the mirror link, _attacking_ her (stars forbid)...

She wouldn't kill you for it, you don't think, but the aftermath wouldn't be kind. You know her moods better than your own, a combination of your efforts, her responsiveness, and the doll's aid. The majority of the longest night of your life has been spent determining what the moon presence won't allow from you. She's only surprised you once outside of your first encounter, and that was...

...your fault.

It always is.

You're the moon presence's child, by blood and by nurture if not by birth (small mercies), so her motives tend to come back to either enforcing her authority or protecting you. But you still don't know what Giratina wants from you, only that, whatever it is, it leads more often than not to Giratina's goals aligning with yours.

Paralleling yours, at least.

Giratina's made no real secret of how it thinks of you. The uncertainty stems entirely from your side, but you think it's justifiable. If you're hearing it right (and there's a good chance that you're not, half the time Giratina's speaking too much for you to parse anyway, but – if you are, then) what Giratina is looking for is –

You slow down for a moment, long enough only to press your fingers over your blindfold and shake your head.

If you try, you can remember a time when the prospect of battling a god would have worried you more than the threat of a conversation with one, but it's a memory scarred over by layers on layers on layers of nostalgia and moonlight. It's not now. You drop your hand, draw your rifle, and pick up your pace.

You're close enough to identify Palkia's opponent. Giratina named her _darkrai_ , a living, rogue fragment of Arceus's nightmare, so you're not caught entirely off guard by the prickle of recognition as you come into sensing range. Her presence is a spined, skittering thing at the rim of your mind. A living wound. You've braced for singing before you've made the conscious decision to, but of course the darkrai wouldn't be humming.

You clench your teeth. She's not a winter lantern. The resemblance is there, but in passing only – whatever else the similarities, she lacks the heady overtone of _perversion_ that forms the basis of a winter lantern's existence. She's as much one of those abominations as you are.

And you can't overlook the fact that you'll be working together. Whatever her stake in the fight, you have no reason yet to believe that you're not on the same side.

There is music, though. It's caught up in the tangle of the darkrai's existence, buried half-seen behind a labyrinth of fog. Nothing audible. What little of it you brush up against feels much less unpleasant than you would have expected. Perhaps you could catch a strain of it if you tried to listen, but that thought passes on without becoming more than a casual fancy. The darkrai doesn't need the distraction.

You quicken through a door into someone's home, limp in a hurry up the stairs, shoot out a bedroom window from the doorway, and from there another quickening sees you onto the roof.

The darkrai's throwing in glancing blows where she can, but for the most part she's fleeing, dragging the airborne fight across the sky. Less a fight than a game of tag. You can't imagine that's an easy pace for her to keep up, but it's necessary. The bleeding distortion around Palkia's left shoulder is the only major injury you find, and it doesn't seem to be affecting it much at all.

Even from a distance, even with Palkia not aiming its attacks anywhere near you, the sheer force of the energy it's throwing around is enough to raise your hackles. The explosions of the buildings its missed blows obliterate aren't as loud as the shrieks of the attacks themselves. Aside from the attacks, it's also sending out irregular, massive bursts of energy, and with each one the darkrai flares to match it, though she's barely a candle to Palkia's star.

From what Giratina said, the darkrai must be catching Palkia's attempted spacial alterations. She doesn't quite get all of them, though. One slips past, and Palkia follows it through with an energy beam that only misses because the darkrai... dematerializes, it seems like.

If Palkia lands so much as a glancing blow on you, the result wouldn't be pleasant.

You can still back out. You have nothing to gain from going through with this and nothing to lose by stepping away. No Great One looming over you, waiting for you to end the hunt – Giratina's watching from somewhere nearby, but there's no fair comparison to make between Giratina and your god. In the end, this isn't your fight.

But there are still people here in this town that the Great One is destroying.

Palkia might kill you, but it's not a certainty. The mere risk of your death doesn't carry more weight than the lives of every one of the people who remain. You've spent the entire night killing anyone who crosses your path. Stopping to help a few people won't even the scales, but it's at least a break from routine. How exciting.

(Though, objectively – and you don't mean this callously, but it should be noted – your one life might actually be worth more than the stragglers'. The dream would need a new host if you became unfit. Gods know, the role would destroy any of the new candidates. They might not know it, but there are people who rely on the simple fact of your existence.

But you haven't been a doctor in a long time. Triage isn't much your concern anymore.)

The darkrai and Palkia should pass directly over you, if you're reading the flow of combat right, but it'll be a short window. You slide the gun into your belt and take an eyeball out of one of your pockets, making very sure not to put pressure on it. It feels almost liquid. The thick coating of slime oozes down to pool in your gloved palm, drying to nothing as it spreads.

You're still leery of using the blacksky eye. You have no idea of its origin or how it ended up in your possession. Maybe you picked it up at Byrgenwerth or a Chalice dungeon, or maybe you tore an eye out of a living person's skull in order to craft a weapon out of it. You really don't remember. The only things you can claim for certain are that its owner was human at the time of the enucleation, and that (thankfully) it's adult-sized.

But moral hangups are rich coming from you. You can't deny the tool's utility. More range than a gun, significantly more destructive power, and almost as much speed. It only lacks the rifle's spread, which tends to be the deal breaker, but for this you won't be needing that.

A few more seconds. Your fingers curl tenderly around the eye.

You follow the darkrai's position rather than Palkia's – she's the one leading the fight's direction, with Palkia always ending up in the space it just vacated. She's the one you aim for when they flash into range. You press your thumb through the thick slime to the organ beneath, and a meteor tears upwards out of the pupil, streaking across the seventy feet between you and Palkia to smash solidly into its tail.

Palkia doesn't even flinch, making this the second time your arcane tools have had all but no effect here.

You're not about to forget that the unicorn walked off a direct hit from A Call Beyond. It's a trend that's growing worrying.

However, while Palkia doesn't flinch, it does freeze, halting mid-swipe while the darkrai flutters back from it. Might not have hurt it, but you seem to have caught its attention. You drop the tool back into your pocket and switch to the rifle, and up above the darkrai takes advantage of the moment to launch a beam of some sort of energy into Palkia's chest.

The Great One roars in response, a discordant, wordless, rumbling shriek of pain, and it swivels in the air and –

– you take a running leap off of the roof as behind you Palkia hurtles bodily into the building. You quicken as you reach the street, dissipating the impact, and awaken steady on your feet as brick and dust rain down around you, the smaller chunks of debris crumbling into raw dream-stuff midair.

The darkrai hit Palkia after you did. Is the Great One just... going to ignore that? Completely?

It doesn't even pause to shake off the rubble before it flies at you, the few remaining intact portions of wall crashing apart around it. Its attention is _entirely_ on you.

You only have time to fire off one shot before you're forced to quicken. Bullets slow it exactly as much as the blacksky eye did.

It swipes its claws through your incorporeal form and then uses the momentum to turn and follow you as you strafe around it. You dart towards it before you reform, and when you come back to yourself you're ducking under its leg, clipping its ankle with the beast cutter, and quickening again before its suddenly water-encrusted tail can smash you.

You keep running, trying to gain some distance, but Palkia's somehow already spun around to face you again. It opens its mouth and gathers energy between its jaws.

Your bad foot comes down hard on a piece of rubble and slips out from under you. You barely manage to turn the fall into a roll, and then into a quickening as Palkia looses the attack.

You stumble as you reform, the wind pouring out from the beam enough to unbalance you, but you recover without incident because, instead of immediately punishing the misstep, Palkia's charging up for another attack.

It doesn't feel the same as the ones before. Looser, less concentrated, but significantly more structured than any other working Palkia's yet woven.

The darkrai hammers it from above with another of those pulse attacks, and Palkia roars, half-turning to look at her, and releases the energy orbiting around its shoulders.

The energy expands rapidly, crawling out in every direction. The parts of the dream that it envelops seem almost to bend under it. You jerk a step back in alarm, but you can't outrace it – you raise the beast cutter in front of your face as a poor attempt at a shield and quicken as the leading edge reaches you.

The energy lingers. The change hits you as soon as you reawaken, and with it comes a dread like you haven't felt since the earliest hours of the night.

When you lower your arm, it's not like moving through molasses. The air is not the problem.

You feel like you're trapped in the old, mundane dreams, the ones where you would try to run but your dream-self wouldn't remember the motions and you'd have to attempt to muddle through them anyhow. So very, very slowly. You have to get out.

You focus, but the energy's outer bounds are too far away for you to feel.

Palkia rushes you. It wasn't this fast before, and you weren't this slow _._ Even your reactions – quickening's nearly instantaneous for you by now, but somehow, this time, it takes a fraction of a second longer.

The quickening itself hasn't been affected. Some small consolation.

When you solidify again, your left arm is a mass of pain, the torn sleeve matted with blood from from your desperate attempt to block Palkia's claws from reaching your torso. Its claws never even touched you. It only scraped you with its palm. The saw-toothed hide alone was enough to shred through padded leather.

Despite the hurt, it feels superficial for the most part. Broken skin, bruising, at least one fracture, but it's not out of commission. Which you appreciate, really, because Palkia is still coming your way and the last thing you need is more handicaps.

You predict the next swipe early and step inside it, draw another line of blood across Palkia's leg, quicken out, dart back and away from its claws again to try to gain a little breathing room – it doesn't work. Palkia follows.

More energy is gathering around its shoulders. You itch to put a stop to it, but there's no opportunity. Nothing to do but scurry like a rat out of the way of another slash, hoping the next energy attack isn't an unavoidable area-of-effect –

– oh, _hell_ –

– you stagger, quicken on reflex while you're falling and rush away from Palkia.

It wouldn't be enough, except that the darkrai chooses that moment to loose the nightmare portal she's been putting together. Palkia, intent on you, doesn't make any attempt at all to avoid it. The Great One drops like a boulder, the ground shuddering with the impact, and doesn't rise.

You materialize on your feet. The next instant, you're bracing the beast cutter on the ground just to stay that way.

Gravity manipulation. You didn't know it was _possible_. You were fairly sure that it wasn't, even. The power it requires should make it completely unfeasible.

Your savior, that darkrai is. She's still waling on the god's prone form with electricity and the other variant of arcane energy she uses. Doesn't seem to be doing much, but you have to laud the enthusiasm.

She reminds you of someone.

Palkia's tail shifts. Its claws curl against the ground. It won't be trapped for very long, you don't think, but the cage is still an impressively thorough one. Aside from the twitches and growls, Palkia's not showing any reaction to the beating that darkrai is raining down. A winter lantern definitely couldn't incapacitate a Great One like that.

You try to take a step forward, trembling with the effort, and only manage to sink heavily to your knees. The workings hold strong even with their caster incapacitated. That's not normal, any more than the gravity alteration is.

Why is the darkrai unaffected? Granted, one of your reasons for interfering was to give her some breathing room, so you're not complaining, per se... but you'd very much like to know why Palkia decided to disregard the opponent capable of knocking it out in favor of the hack job of a hunter who barely gave it a paper cut.

Quickening grows exhausting after a while, more so if you're using it in rapid succession, but there's no getting around it. You can't move at all otherwise. You make your flickering way over to Palkia.

The darkrai's barrage tapers off, which you guess is to avoid hitting you. Everyone you've met since you left the dream has been so genteel about combat. It's uncanny.

You stop next to Palkia's left shoulder. You brace yourself on it, but immediately your injured arm flares, your grip spasms, and your knees buckle. You manage to fall backwards so you don't bash them into the ground again. Right, then; your arm can't support your full weight.

It'll remain that way for the rest of the fight at least. There's a god's ichor on your blade, but blood hasn't done much for you since you became host. (You can still get drunk off of it, but this might not be the best time to go for that use.) The injury will heal when it heals.

Can you pull this off sitting down?

No. Too far to extend and not enough leverage.

Alright.

You quicken to bring yourself upright, leaving the beast cutter on the ground. In the instant before you're dragged back down, wet, scalding heat fills your uninjured arm, fur blooms from your skin and claws from your nails, and you bring your hand back and ram the the limb up to the elbow into Palkia's shoulder with an explosion of shattering crystal.

It feels like punching a wall, with the minor difference that your bones don't shatter. Grimacing, you shift to make sure the entry and exit angles don't align, then wrench your arm out as violently as you can.

Palkia howls. Fragments of stone or gemstone or crystal spill out between your fingers to clink around your feet.

The god's claws score through pavement as it drags itself out of sleep, the street beneath its thrashing breaking apart into dream-mist, and you beat a frantic retreat with your weapons while the darkrai hits it with another beam to briefly stagger it.

Somehow, it's moving faster. It's back on its feet before you have time to do more than duck into an alleyway with your distended finger bones cracking back into human alignment. Old habits – it used to be that, put against a larger opponent, you'd look for a place where they couldn't reach so you could slowly whittle them down from hiding.

But the creatures of Palkia's size never gave you that chance. Cathedrals and arenas and silvered lakes with no end, battlegrounds that forced direct confrontation – and Palkia, of course, goes through stone structures like a Gatling gun through powder barrels. The best you can hope for is some cover to reinforce your retreat.

The alley's not a dead end, thankfully. You squeeze through the narrowing passage to the street on the other side and slump panting against a wall, rubbing around your eye sockets. White noise tinges your thoughts.

Quickening consists of a sort of microsleep, skirting the edge of dreaming without crossing fully over. It's an impossible state of mind to sustain for longer than seconds at a time. Repeated use carries the threat of falling asleep. Currently, doing so wouldn't be a fatal error, but it would return you to the dream.

You're not ready for that. You'll go back, you can't not, but you want a little more time.

If nothing else, you don't want to leave this task unfinished.

Behind you, Palkia roars. You hear your first word from Giratina's sibling: _Violation_. The familiar pangs of guilt nip at you before you put them down with clinical efficiency. No. You refuse. You will not be haunted by nightmares of temporarily inconveniencing a Great One who's in the process of destroying a town. Palkia's hurting from Dialga's collision with its dream, but that is not your fault, and you won't feel guilt for it. You arm is still burning.

Still: it's an ugly, breaking cry.

Beneath the word's surface layer – it catches you off guard, that you can delve so far now, here, without dedicating time and focus to interpreting the word, but even through your surprise the other outermost meanings find you effortlessly:

A festering storm of emotion about Dialga, utter incomprehension and frothing, murderous rage mingling into patterns too complicated for you to piece together on the fly. Though even without knowing the specifics, you have to think that, if this is what Palkia's feeling, it's no real wonder that it's lashing out. If Giratina didn't tell you that Palkia and Dialga are close, you would never suspect; in this moment, it feels nothing for Dialga besides hate.

Beasts have happened over less. You're honestly impressed that it held the violence off for as long as it did.

Violation of duty (violation of _existence_ , the two one and the same) – Palkia could not possibly care less about the darkrai's escape from Arceus's nightmare, but who in their maker's name does it think it's attacking? That's an invader flaunting itself so near to the core, a cosmos-warped outsider –

– it's referring to you, you acknowledge with a jolt once the reflexive flare of _this foreigner nonsense again_ passes. That explains a few things, and fails to explain many more things.

But work it out later. For now: running (as much as it can be called that) and paying attention for the darkrai's response. If the darkrai chooses to turn around and help Palkia, you'll... have to figure something out.

Luckily, the situation goes well for once.

Palkia's echo hasn't fully faded before the darkrai launches another energy pulse at it. The god howls a sound that needs no translation and leaps into flight.

What's the darkrai's motive? you have to wonder as you ghost into a house before Palkia can spot you from the air. The same as yours? If she's anything like a winter lantern – if she's anything like you – defending the nightmare she serves would be her goal. If Palkia's to be believed, though, she's shed that commandment, and Palkia has no interest in understanding what other reason she must have. Giratina had no idea either.

You pass through a door into a home. The house's entryway has a rug, so you rap your knuckles against the wallpaper instead of the floor. There are a few spots where the sound bounces back too quickly or doesn't return at all, and through one of the filled spaces you make out the shape of a low table. It's close enough that you scoot over to it from the floor instead of quickening.

It feels like the darkrai outside is managing, if not particularly well. Palkia's missing more often, taking longer to recover when it does (and being notably more vocal in its rage with every overshot lunge), and treating its injured arm gingerly, but there's no getting around the fact that the god is faster now than it was before you stepped in. You don't have too much time to squander.

You slide your hand over the tabletop. You stop when you bump into an obstacle, and you pick it up: a book, a very thin one with a bizarre binding. The covers are pliable. Laminated paper, maybe.

You drop it on the ground. It reaches the floor when you expect it to.

Frowning while you replace the book, you turn your attention onto one of the two latticeworks of energy binding the air. What Palkia did was more than gravity manipulation. You suspected as much when it didn't affect the darkrai or Palkia itself, but what exactly are the parameters?

They're simple enough, it turns out. You could have thrown together the theory for them in your... sleep.

The gravity, you find, is the secondary component. The better part of the working is spent on identifying and marking what within the energy's bounds carries a sense of self. It's a base you can see dozens of applications for already, and as soon as you realize that you let go of your sense of the one working to reach for the other overlaying it.

Instead of increasing the pull of gravity as the second one does, the first working Palkia cast considers the maximum physically possible speeds of all the targets within range, compares them to each other, and reverses the difference. (Speed alone, oddly enough, divorced entirely from physical strength.) Palkia currently outpaces you by exactly the same amount as you did it.

It's not a large gulf, but it was the only appreciable advantage you had over the god. Without it, you've been effectively hamstrung.

But aside from the minor difference in function, the two workings' structures are identical.

Skeletons. That's what they are. That's what Palkia cast out into the world. They function, and they function well, you wouldn't deny that, but they're almost as bare-bones as Palkia's nightmare. They do exactly what they appear to do and nothing more. There isn't even an attempt to refine the power cost or to make an exception in their effects for the user.

Though Palkia isn't showing it, it's targeted by the increased gravity as much as you are. Its immunity comes from another source, as the darkrai's must.

And, you realize with honest alarm, there's something else you haven't found either.

You must have overlooked it, though. No one could possibly forget to account for it.

You feel through them again, searching, and as you do you come to understand that Palkia's workings operate by the same principle that hand-mounted cannons do. The sheer, absurd amount of power involved patches over by brute force all of the holes that should be flaring wide. They're absolutely bizarre workings, but they're solid, and they'll stay that way until they collapse under their own weight in a few more minutes. You're not strong enough to break either of them.

But maybe you can...

You've gone through them twice and still not found it. Disbelief is starting to give way to a different flavor of disbelief. Palkia can't honestly have...

Outside, the darkrai discharges an electric current straight into Palkia's injured shoulder. The god screams – the floor trembles, and upstairs something heavy collides with the ground – suddenly, the darkrai's taking an arcane orb head-on.

The darkrai had no time to dodge; Palkia about-faced without ever transitioning through the space in-between.

You really shouldn't be dawdling here, but you can't wrap your head around this. The flimsiness of the nightmare is one thing, more or less understandable in Palkia's current state, but throwing a working out into the world without including a safeguard in it to block modification of it _after_ it's been cast is downright unbelievable.

While the darkrai falls from the sky, you quickly skim through Palkia's work a third time. You're only getting your hopes up, surely it's not possible to mess up this harshly, but you're halfway through the third skim and you still haven't found it...

It's not there.

It's... not there.

Well.

You'll take full advantage.

The workings might not break, not to you, but they'll bend. You wrap your fist around air, and the things in the air that you could never feel with your skin. Only the speed reversal has relevance for the darkrai, so that's the strand you pick out of the weave around your curled hand, leaving the gravity-affecting working alone for a moment longer. You take the piece of the working that's in your grasp and twist it.

The change races outwards as soon as it sets in, rippling towards the distant bounds of the energy field; when it reaches Palkia far overhead your shock breaks out of you as laughter, a silent spasm of lungs and throat. You feel it already.

The weight pressing you to the ground isn't gone, but when you grab the table and push yourself to your feet it doesn't slow you anymore. The table creaks under the pressure.

You might be quicker than Palkia, but you're certainly not stronger.

You sprint out of the house and towards the spot the next street over where the darkrai still hasn't risen from her fall. She's struggling up, but you think she's still in contact with the ground when Palkia reaches her. She manages to dematerialize in time, though, then slips out from under Palkia. The god lunges at her, and the darkrai spins out of the way. Both Palkia's claws come slamming down onto empty earth.

You move into range in time to hear, instead of shattering stone, the scrape of claws rebounding off the cobbles. Palkia rumbles, low and heavy as an earthquake, and slowly curls its fingers, pressing down. The ground doesn't give. Palkia didn't notice, seems like, when you modified the speed-reversing technique to target strength instead.

The darkrai, who's made use of the lull to put three dozen feet between herself and the god, launches the beam she's been charging. Palkia jerks back when the rippling energy connects with its bicep just below the shoulder, but instead of retaliating, it raises its head and looks at you.

Even after what it said, even half-expecting it, the attention still surprises you. The darkrai's already proven that, given ten uninterrupted seconds, she can put together a cage to trap a god, and yet Palkia is still willing to entirely disregard her the instant it notices you. The only explanation you can imagine is that you're missing context.

But that's not something to think about now. Now is for putting on a burst of speed through that last stretch of distance, reaching Palkia before it's fully turned, and swinging the beast cutter across.

The blade cuts. It doesn't glance off Palkia's rough hide, it doesn't scrape half an inch through and stop – it _cuts_ , slashes into Palkia's leg and carves a furrow through with only slight resistance. The god's blood splatters thick and hot and sharp across you before you quicken away.

You totter a step back as soon as you reform, thoughts blank with shock. A drop of blood landed on the narrow stretch of bare skin between the blindfold and the mask. It's so hot you think you feel your cheek freezing.

That went – that went... well. You landed a hit, the injury you inflicted bled, and that's how it's supposed to go...

So easily, though?

Stars, but you're out of practice.

If Palkia's surprised at all, it takes to the turn of events much better than you do. It lashes out, and you barely remember in time to dance back, not even thinking to take a swing on the retreat.

But you're beginning to recover, the natural rhythm of a fight beating through the dumbfounded haze. Palkia rears its head, energy gathering between its jaws, and you dart aside as it looses the beam that smashes a hole straight through the house behind you. Against the backdrop of collapsing wood and stone and plaster, you charge.

With the exception of the mad god who assaulted the dream, Great Ones don't generally have veins, and every Great One possesses a different and unpredictable set of organs, the majority of which they neither need nor use. The only foolproof way to kill any god is through bleeding them dry.

In a biological sense, a Great One will take near any single injury in stride. In a practical sense, though, broken skin still irritates. Palkia screams as you drag another wound through its leg, its slash misses you as you quicken back, and as you materialize you draw blood on its hand, biting deep enough that your blade stops against bone in its palm.

With a howl, it spreads its wings and flies at you. You quicken, but as soon you pass into mist Palkia stops in the air mid-leap, so abruptly and with so little warning that physics obviously had no say in the matter, and spins to follow you as you flow behind it. It snatches for you as you materialize, and frantically you fall into another quickening straight on the heels of the first.

Your mind blanks partway in. Only the instinctive burst of absolute panic at that fact that hauls you back to waking.

The next you're aware, you're standing in front of Palkia's incoming claws. You can't quicken again (and that's not a conscious thought, only heart-deep knowledge and a surge of fear), there's not enough time to move away, and you understand over the next fraction of an instant that this is going to hurt and if it doesn't then the only reason would be that you died on hit.

You raise the beast cutter overhead to block, for all the good that'll do, even your bad arm doing its small part to brace, and then both Palkia's hands come down and –

– a light impact.

Relief hits you as hard as Palkia should have.

That's right, that's _right_ , you forgot.

Palkia presses down, energy blazing into being along its right claws – its left remain as they are – and you hurry to shove it off of you. You dance backwards while Palkia brings its hands together, the energy moving away from its skin to the space between its claws –

– and the darkrai's nightmare portal hits it full on from the side.

You duck away before it collapses on top of you and put some distance between the two of you while the darkrai uses the god for target practice.

Palkia must have soaked up a thunderstorm's worth of electricity by now, on top of whatever the darkrai's other attack is. You injured it a little more obviously, but both of you seem to have slowed it down about as much as the other has. Which is to say not at all. It's having some difficulty channeling along its left arm, but you're fairly sure Palkia can take you on one-handed in any case.

That's fine. It's not what you're here to do. It's a conclusion you'd prefer to avoid, in fact. No one's commissioned you for a murder; besides which, whatever else Palkia is, it's also Giratina's sibling. You're only here to keep it occupied.

Unfortunately, that's rather the issue.

You find a bench nearby that wasn't shredded in the conflict. Palkia's first working snaps apart as soon as you're settled. You lean back against the seat as the weight presses in, letting your breathing even out.

You could be using the opportunity the darkrai's made to do a little more damage to the god, but hurting it might hasten its waking. Even if it was a coincidence that it woke earlier right after you tore into its shoulder, you're not in a position to make that risk. Not until you can move again, at the very least. There's still a bit of time before the increased gravity fails.

Until then, you take stock of your options.

You can't keep this up indefinitely. Palkia's nearly caught you out a few times already. If things keep on as they are, it's going to kill you, and likely the darkrai afterwards. Without you to snag Palkia's attention, the darkrai can't put together the working to trap it in sleep. Your ally's impressively durable, but the last solid hit that caught her almost took her out of the battle, and she's flagging in her counters against Palkia's spacial manipulation. You're under no illusions: her efforts on that front are the main factor in either of your continued existence.

You think... you've gotten a good enough look at what Palkia and the darkrai have been doing that you might know how to pick up her slack. You'd only need to be more precise about your power usage than she is.

Despite having some grasp on the theory, though, you can't put the thought into practice. The only arcane power you can channel freely comes from your highly specialized and inflexible tools. The moon presence made very sure of that. You're forced to rely passively on the darkrai to stop Palkia from using its ability. Once she fails, that will be the fight.

That's something, too. You can't recall thinking that of an opponent before. While you do go into every single fight fully expecting to lose terribly, you don't typically see it as absolute certainty.

You suspect that the people of this part of the cosmos are simply _stronger_ than the people of yours, and by a significant margin. The humans seem largely sane in spite of their sublimation into a nightmare and prolonged encounters with Giratina. The not-Kin threw lightning bolts at you fully anticipating that you would survive them, and none of the three who were struck by them perished on the spot. And you'd very much like to see a winter lantern attempt against a Great One any part of what the darkrai's done.

Really. You would.

Then there's Palkia, who cast without apparent difficulty a working you thought impossible even for Great Ones due to the sheer amount of power one would have to channel for it.

And... warden of space, Giratina called it. It moves by _translating the universe around itself_. That's just excessive.

It hadn't really sunk in yet, the implication of Arceus's existence. Confirmation of a creator deity. Oh, you can believe that a single being built the basis for a multiverse. That's what even the palest of dreams is, really, a self-contained dimension. Increase the scale exponentially, and a god might make a world out of a sleeping mortal's fleeting musings. You've met your gods. You know what they're capable of. Go even further, and a universe – multiple universes – might not be entirely out of the question. Clearly aren't entirely out of the question.

Somehow, though, you forgot to follow that thought through: if Arceus is to your god what your god is to a mortal, then where do its children stand?

As far as Palkia goes, the answer is evidently _wherever it wants to_. What do you think you're doing, trying to put yourself on a level with it? You're just a dog that's slipped its leash.

Well, setting theology aside. (The gods are gods; there's little enough to be done about that, so you might as well not try.) On a purely logistical level: however powerful Palkia might be, you still do need to hold fast against it as for as long as the nightmare requires to empty.

The problem lies in the fact that you have no way of judging how long that will be. The stragglers may have already cleared out. You could very well be waiting for Palkia to wake so you can continue an increasingly perilous, increasingly pointless fight.

Giratina could tell you if that's the case. You could ask. It's watching through the windows of every house on the street. But you're fairly sure that if you place yourself near a reflective surface large enough for you to fit through, Giratina will try to drag you back to its side. From there, you don't think it would allow you back into Palkia's nightmare, regardless of whether it turned out you'd left people behind.

Truth be told, even if not for that then you still wouldn't particularly want to face Giratina. It preferred you alive earlier, but the blood clinging to your weapon belongs to its kin.

Ignoring its confusing stance on you, you quite like the Great One. It's... been kind to the townsfolk, and to you. Well and beyond any casual definition of common decency. You don't look forward to facing its enmity.

When gravity snaps back to normal, you've yet to come to a decision.

You rub your blindfold. Well, there _is_ another angle to look at things from, you suppose: if you die, the darkrai will most likely follow. If you leave, will she do the same? She hasn't so much as paused to reposition herself in the time since Palkia went down, still hitting it with the same attacks cycled over and over and over again. You don't know if she's even aware of how little she seem to affect it. She's not leaving Palkia very happy, of course, but you can't tell that she's injuring it all that much either.

Or she is having an effect and you're the one who's missing the point, but either way, the darkrai's stake in this fight strikes you as something from a plane far beyond logic.

You're having a difficult time convincing yourself to care about her life. She doesn't seem to hold the thing in much regard, and she would know better than anyone.

If she turns out to be the only other soul remaining in the nightmare, then you can abandon her here without qualms if she wants to stay. Poor repayment for someone who saved your life, perhaps, but that's the sentiment that got you thrown off a roof by the man you were trying to pull back from the edge. You've learned your lesson.

Maybe not the right lesson.

But let dead men be bygones, and all that. Right or wrong, you're done thinking about what happened with Alfred.

...Well, not much to be done about things here. You push yourself back to your feet with a sigh. Until you know for certain – somehow – that the nightmare is clear, or until you're incapable of delaying Palkia any longer, leaving remains off the table. Any speculations to the contrary are just distractions from the thought that you'll be fighting Palkia indefinitely. You're not looking forward to that.

You wonder if you can at least take out its other arm while it's down. Doubtless it won't appreciate the move, but it isn't like it can grow any _more_ furious. You start forwards.

Halfway to the downed god, you stop, half-turning by reflex in the direction of the approaching not-Kin still a few hundred feet off. It's the ice bird from earlier. Well, you guess you did want to know if there was anyone still around, but what is _he_ doing in the town when he was one of the first out of it?

Should you try to head him off? As soon as the thought flashes by, your mind fills in the blanks with every way it would go poorly. You don't trust yourself to interact with him, not with your track record for peaceful resolutions, and especially not after the confusion of your last meeting. If you didn't know better, you'd suspect he attempted to move on from your fight, but that's unrealistic. The chattering bird and the water rat approached you as well in the same manner, and you can't imagine those two forgiving you. You don't want to treat Giratina's magnanimity as the norm. It's far more likely that you misread the ice bird's intent.

You'll leave him to the darkrai. With how she's acting, you're not optimistic about foisting diplomacy onto her, but she can't possibly manage worse than you would. At least she might share a language with the locals.

With how readily she adapted to your presence, though, there's a decent chance she'll invite him in instead of sending him away. That'd be... you suppose you'll need to step in if that happens. More complications.

Her attacks trail off when you near Palkia. The god isn't showing signs of waking immediately. You should still have a little more time. You hang the beast cutter at your waist and stop next to Palkia's uninjured shoulder. If it makes its way out of the darkrai's nightmare, you'll be ready with a visceral attack, but until then you'll simply stand watch and hope it stays down long enough for you to sort things out with the newcomers.


	16. Darkrai

_Time is Relative: An Explanation by Darkrai of How One Goes Twenty Years Without Realizing Your Best Friend is Dead, and also of Some Other Things_

 _this chapter was supposed to cover the entire rest of the battle, but five paragraphs back into the present day and i realized i'd made a terrible mistake. some of the information that only Darkrai has access to is kind of important though, so this is a compromise._

* * *

"You've been quiet, Darkrai," Alicia says. Her body is a lake brought to stillness, all the ripples and shivers of a moment painted into her skin. The sun dapples her hair, gold on silver where the branches above don't catch the light first, and shadows the wrinkles in her hands. Her hands are folded on the blanket in her lap. She has moved, but Darkrai has not, so Alicia waits until the space between them is even again.

The tower has tolled since she began waiting.

"What are you thinking of?" Alicia asks.

Darkrai does not want to be thinking about it, not with Alicia as her companion. She turns back to the checkerboard atop the folding table and slides a black king forwards with a soft-edged finger. _"Check."_

"Checkers, love, not chess," Alicia says, a smile ghosting by like a water-shimmer. "Was it a bad dream?"

" _It ends,"_ says Darkrai, though the ending in and of itself isn't the source of the unease that curdles in her. Her worry is a vile, twisted, terrible thing. Voicing it to Alicia makes it more so. She can't do it. Her role is to preserve, not to worsen.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

She itches to say _thief_ , to say _monster_ , to say _I am going to rend Palkia limb from limb and grind its heart to dust_. She wants to say how it feels to unravel, layer by layer coming apart with each blow brought to bear against her and against the nightmare that is her, sound and sight and scent blurring through a little more with each loss. She wants to say that if she could, she would dig her claws into reality's spine and wrench apart all that is for what it allows to be truth. But Alicia does not teach her those sounds, and Darkrai would not use them with her if she did. Alicia is not the one she wants to say them to.

" _No."_

"Alright," says Alicia, and there's a tint to her smile that only colors it around Darkrai. She sighs. The leaves turn overhead, shifting green shadows across the board. Not far away, a starly calls. "Have I told you what mischief my granddaughter has gotten into most recently? A friend taught her about papier-mâché, and she came home and decided that her room would look much nicer as paper and glue..." She brings her black knight out to threaten a red piece. Darkrai considers the state of the board. "I feel like I didn't explain the rules well enough," Alicia says, scratching her cheek. "I like winning, but this just makes me feel like I'm bullying you. And your cannon, too."

Hesitantly, Darkrai moves her center piece up one space, but Alicia leaps up from the grass with a cry and wraps warm hands around hers. "No no, you can't do that. Please don't, I mean. You _can_ , but you're supposed to keep your general alive. That means on the board. Where it won't be, if it gets captured. Just keep it there, Darkrai. Oh, my knight was bullying your cannon; here, it's going into timeout where it _belongs_ ," she says, and as she settles back onto the blanket she scoops up her knight with a sharp twist of her wrist and flings it. It arcs into the pond with a splash.

She stares at the ripples until they fade. "Ah."

Darkrai pools into shadow. When the dark-type returns from the bottom of the pond, muck-covered knight in tow, Alicia decides to pack the board away. "Don't tell anyone," she whispers, looking furtively about as she rubs the knight dry in her handkerchief.

" _I won't,"_ says Darkrai, and Alicia looks furtively at her too.

"Promise?"

" _Yes."_

The sun is bright through the trees, lanky and spread afar as they are. Light glimmers off the metal in the distance, cut close to the horizon, latticed with wood and movement. Darkrai looks away from it, up to the empty blue. She drifts. She's half-sunken into the base of a tree when Alicia finishes and buttons her bag closed, but she stretches back into light as Alicia turns to her.

Alicia looks up too, shading her eyes. "Oh, you can see it from here now."

" _What is it?"_ Darkrai asks, and only after Alicia has begun to answer does she realize the sounds don't make the question she thought she was asking. Once Alicia finishes explaining about Uncle Godey and the tower and the music, she corrects herself: _"Why?"_

"Why is Uncle Godey building it?"

" _Yes."_

Alicia taps her chin, mouth scrunching to the side. "I think he's just building it to make something beautiful. He's really excited about finishing it someday. He showed me the pictures of what they want it to look like, and – Uncle Godey really is amazing."

The appeal of erecting a shrine to two of the firstborns, one a disappointment and the other unremarkable, escapes Darkrai, but it makes Alicia bounce on her feet and draw the shape of the tower in the air for Darkrai to see. It makes Alicia happy. Darkrai doesn't need more than that, even as the tower strikes like a thorn at her eye each time she sees it.

"He asked me to help him with the music! He wants Oración to be one of the pieces the tower plays, and I'm the only one who can play it. You should come with me when we record it, Darkrai. I can show you the diagrams of the tower, too."

" _No,"_ Darkrai says. She rarely understands all or most of what Alicia tells her, but she can focus on the pieces that she does know. She knows what the reaction is when she's sighted in town.

"It'll just be me and Uncle Godey there, and you. You can stay in my shadow in town, right?" Alicia says. "You're the one I learned it from, you should be there too." Alicia hums the first notes, and some of the coiled fear and frustration loosens its hold on Darkrai. She remembers the tone of the light and the smell of the pollen and the sound of Alicia's voice when the nightmare ended. They were the same then as they are now. Good things, too, come in cycles. This is not the end.

* * *

 _i can't think of a way to include in-story why Darkrai goes by female pronouns, so here's an explanation for anyone who wants it: Darkrai prefers how they sound because they're what Alicia goes by. that's it._

 _also, replying to a point raised by Guest! (hello!) there's actually something going on with the hunter's arcane attacks and how ineffectual most of them are. there've been a few scattered hints on it across the story. (very very few, very very scattered, i'd be astonished if anyone had connected them.) that's all i'll say on that topic at the moment._


	17. Dawn II

_the point where i finally admit to myself that i have absolutely no idea how long this arc is gonna end up being_

* * *

 _Pikachu's not here_ is the first thing Dawn notices.

The second thing she notices is Palkia.

Until she met Brock, Dawn didn't think of herself as religious. Brock asks her questions sometimes about the trivia he reads in his travel guides, and they always trip her up because she didn't think they were things that had to be explained to anyone. What's the significance of lakes? Why are the columns in museums fluted the same way across the region? Why do calendars keep track of the lunar cycle?

(Ash is Kantoan too, but he doesn't ask those questions. Brock said once, to Pikachu's enthusiastic agreement, that this is because Ash is a bad example for anything except Ash.)

By Sinnohan standards, Dawn's not unusual. It was only common sense to stow a Mesprit charm in her pencil bag when she decided to talk to the older kid she liked back in school, like it was common sense to buy one of Cresselia's feathers to wear for a good night's rest the night before an important pokémon contest. She believes in the prevalence of the trinity and Cresselia's benevolence and the hidden land where Arceus stood when it brought about creation because those are facts of the world.

Organized religion was tied so closely to the way the old kingdoms governed that the Indigo League thought they had to stamp it out entirely to conquer the region. The thing is, though, that the Sinnohan concept of religion was too different from the invaders'. Like Alola and Unova, Sinnoh has traditions of asking their gods for favors – real favors, not Kanto's weird business of building shrines in the middle of nowhere and asking their legends to pretty please stay there and don't bother anyone. The three regions that made up the League at the time couldn't wrap their heads around it. Hoenn in particular was utterly appalled.

Though they tried, they couldn't destroy what they didn't understand. Enough survived under different names that, centuries after the unification of Sinnoh, a ten-year old girl who failed her mythology module in school (though it was from truancy, to be clear) still knows her home's legendaries by heart, what they can do and how a human should convince them to do it.

Dawn knows Palkia as the god who can't be convinced. Can't be bribed. Can't be threatened. Can't be negotiated with at all. Humans and pokémon have tried. It doesn't go well. The best way to manage Palkia is to get out of its way and repair the damage after it leaves.

Alola can back Sinnoh up on that claim. Dawn has never learned the details of the story, but she's heard the really important parts: Palkia riled up the Alolan pantheon somehow, the Alolan pantheon confronted it, and now the archipelago keeps track of wormhole sightings in its weather reports right under the temperature and the chances of cloudy skies.

The dragon of space is as much natural disaster as it is pokémon. That's the role it takes on in the old myths. In what legends it appears in, it's neither villain nor hero but instead the obstacle whose sudden entrance instantly derails everyone else's carefully laid plans. It's not undefeated – people have driven it off before. But not easily. Not without cost.

Even beyond its strength, it has reasons for appearing where it does, and stopping it from doing its work results in crises like Alola's.

Meanwhile, _letting_ it do its work results in widespread damage, unless its friendlier counterpart Dialga, protector of time and the second of the two dragons under Arceus, is on hand and willing to try talking it down.

Dawn saw Palkia in the air on the way over. It would've been impossible to miss even if it wasn't fighting the pokémon Ash was looking for, but, since it _was_ , its appearance also came with a revelation, and a sinking feeling: Darkrai really is the one responsible for what happened to the town. Palkia wouldn't have come after it otherwise.

But Palkia is just as much in the wrong. It doesn't need to go this far to make Darkrai stop. Dawn and Ash and Piplup have come across giant, still-widening holes in the ground, opening up not to earth but to the same angry clouds that make up the sky, and they've seen buildings shattered and smoking and flooded, the bricks melted to slag and blown across a city block. Festival stalls halfway to vaporized, trees cracked and toppling, lampposts torn from the ground and crumpled from water blasts. It's made the town into its battlefield.

Maybe Palkia's being so free with its attacks because it understands it won't hurt anyone. Dawn wants to think that, she does – but she's a practical sort. Wishing alone won't change a thing's nature. Not for Palkia, and not for Darkrai either. She knows their stories.

No one is in immediate peril just yet, though, so Dawn sets Piplup on the ground, then snatches her water from her bag and downs the bottle. Ash copies her. Both of them have sweat dripping down their hair and clothes. They ran two miles at close to a sprint over ground littered with debris, and Dawn carried Piplup when it couldn't keep up. At least their camping supplies are off with Brock by the lake. Dawn wouldn't still be on her feet otherwise. She crouches and shows the bottle to Piplup to refill, and the dust swarming thick in the air scratches inside her throat as she pants. Staravia, not tired at all, lands on an exposed wooden beam peeking out of the blasted ruin of a wall.

Ash gets his breath back first. He brings his hands to his mouth to call up to the darkrai watching them, but Dawn interrupts without thinking, grabbing his ankle. " _Ash_ ," she hisses. Her voice is low, even up against the silence that's no longer filled by Palkia's assault. She wants it that way. Palkia's either asleep or downed, which is bad, but Dawn does not want to be the first thing it hears when it wakes up either in case it gets the idea that she and her friends are here to fight it. She's proud of her team, but it doesn't shame her or them to admit that they can't go toe to toe with a pokémon even Champions won't face alone.

That Darkrai can is pretty worrying. Palkia has a couple of scratches here and there, the blood clotting in them clear like diamond more than water, faceted beneath light, and clean despite the dust settled across the rest of its pale hide. Those types of injuries Dawn would expect of any pokémon who's just come out of a battle, but there's also a dark, deep, jagged crater in Palkia's shoulder that makes her flinch. Darkrai's not playing by League rules. If the attack that did it had taken Palkia in the head...

She swallows, stands – Ash catches her when her legs try to give out – and asks him, "Don't you know who that _is_?"

He reaches for his pokédex, which is not an answer. Ash consults his pokédex most every time he meets a new pokémon, even when he already recognizes the species. It's because people are constantly discovering new things about pokémon, he's told her, and so the pokédex always has something new to tell him when he asks.

"Palkia, huh?" he says after a moment of reading the screen.

He might be older than Dawn, but he's not any taller. It's easy to lean over his shoulder and skim the text. _Legendary pokémon_ , _only known member of its species_ , _ability to distort space_ , right, okay, but is there any context here? Any mention of how it only appears around spacial anomalies? Directions to immediately beat a tactical retreat and contact the authorities if you see it? Maybe if she scrolls to the right – but Ash is already flipping it closed and stowing it away, perfectly content with the summary blurb on the first page. If the circumstances were different he might keep reading, but he doesn't think he needs to, and in any case his partner has been missing for two hours, which trumps everything.

Dawn shakes her head. He doesn't understand. Piplup takes Ash's sock in its beak and tugs, getting him to look down, and with his attention caught Dawn says again, tighter, "Ash. Listen, Palkia only turns up when something, or someone, is messing with space. They were right. Darkrai's evil." Asking it for directions to Pikachu isn't a good idea.

"Messing with _space_?" Ash repeats, dubious, pointing a thumb at the frothing sky.

"Like space-time, not like outer space."

He gasps and turns wide-eyed to the tower in the distance with its pink- and blue-accented spires. "Okay, that one got me," he mutters, then he looks back to Dawn. "There's a pokémon that shows up when someone messes with time, right?"

Dawn blinks. "Should we be talking about that right now?"

He nods. Nothing else.

"Sure, Dialga does," she says.

"Is Dialga blue?"

"Yes," she says warily. Piplup, to the contrary, leans in like a particularly feathery sunflower to hang onto Ash's every word. A quiet warble bubbles in its chest and softens.

Ash is side-eyeing Palkia now. "Do you know what type it is?"

"Dragon and steel."

"Dragon and steel," he muses. "What is that weak to? Is it fire?"

"Where is this going? Is it anywhere I want to be in thirty miles of?"

"It'll all work out," he tells her apropos of absolutely nothing. Things have always worked out for Dawn since she became a trainer so she doesn't doubt him in the least, but also this conversation has been bulldozing through a lot of neon-bright warning signs.

"Dialga isn't actually going to come here, is it?"

"Maybe keep an eye out," Ash suggests.

He's not smiling, but he's not frowning either. He looks thoughtful. His starter is missing, he's standing in an evacuated town turned into a battlefield for legends, and he looks _thoughtful_. Dawn almost tells Pikachu to zap him to shock him out of his sleep talking or exorcise the spirit possessing him or reveal the doppelganger who's stolen his place, but the obvious problem with the plan keeps her from going through.

The spell doesn't last. He startles suddenly; then he shouts up, heedless of the unconscious dragon-god nearby and Dawn's frantic shushing, "Darkrai! Where's Pikachu?"

Darkrai's still quiet overhead, watching them with a narrowed, glowing eye and hearing every word said about it. It's doing scarily well against Palkia, but it doesn't look unscathed in return. Dawn's not entirely sure how she can tell, but she can. It feels different. Most of its body was an absence of color when she last saw it, a shadow for light to tiptoe around. Now it's simply black. Not to mention its scarlet collar is marked with angry scratches and scuff marks, not all of which are from Palkia.

"Ash – "

"I don't know what's happening, not really," Ash says, "but I think Darkrai does. I trust it."

It _would_ know what's happening, being the one who caused it, she thinks with no small amount of hurt. Alice and Tonio and Ash and Brock believed in it.

Ash still believes in it. He must have – probably has – a reason. He's a terrible judge of character when it comes to people, but she can only remember a few times he's been wrong about pokémon, and those times were when a human rubbed him the wrong way and he projected it onto the pokémon. But dark types are the exception to a lot of rules. "Why are you on its side?"

"It doesn't want to hurt Alamos," he answers, confident as he's ever been. "It's got a home here too. And – do you know what it's spent the last few days doing?"

"Scaring people," Dawn says dubiously.

"Well, that, but it was also looking for unown."

"For what?"

"Pokémon who can shape reality."

He uses the plural, like reality warping is just a normal skill an entire species of pokémon should be able to do, and Dawn is briefly very alarmed until she remembers that if they were actually that powerful then she would have heard of them before. They probably only break reality a little bit. That's not scary.

"We didn't find any – I mean, I don't think we found any, Pikachu and Darkrai might have after I fainted, but even though we didn't find any the fact that it was looking for them means something, doesn't it? It thought it knew what the problem was. It was trying to fix things. It's not responsible for this. It's also," he adds, "not the one destroying the town."

It is not, Dawn concedes. She hesitates, turning the situation over in her head. Deliberately, the words slotting into place with weight, she says, "They can't keep on fighting."

Ash trusts Darkrai, but Dawn can't do the same, can't put her faith into a creature that Palkia is targeting. There's no middle ground to find there. So she reaches for the crossroads that they can always find a meeting point at: something needs to be done, and they're in a position to do it. A fact, a decision, and a plan of action all in one.

It doesn't matter that they don't agree on which pokémon is more at fault. Palkia and Darkrai's battle is hurting the town, so it has to stop. Both pokémon have to stop. Any more can come after.

Ash nods. "Yeah. Let's talk to Darkrai first."

Then suddenly, completely out of the blue, Dawn thinks that Pikachu is at the Space-Time Tower.

It takes Piplup's startled squeak and the belated realization that her thought-voice isn't nearly that deep for her to recognize the telepathy. By Dawn's feet Piplup glares up at Darkrai and fluffs its feathers out.

"Why aren't you together?" Ash calls.

Darkrai fails to reply immediately. The moments crawl by, measured by Piplup's slowly growing circumference and Dawn's quickly growing unease. "Darkrai?" Ash tries again.

" _He's hurt."_

Dawn feels her breath catch. Ash jolts, stumbles a little in place. " _What._ How?"

"Palkia," Dawn realizes, or thinks she realizes – she has no evidence, none at all, she can't name where the spark of fast-fading certainty came from. But the word is already spoken even as her mind turns from it, and the world is already responding.

" _Yes,"_ Darkrai confirms. _"Alicia is at the tower."_

Who?

Ash is done with questions. Staravia spreads his wings unprompted just before Ash takes off towards the tower, but the trainer barely makes it two steps before a swarm of lights converges on his pokémon.

A _familiar_ swarm of lights. "Ash! Tell him don't attack!"

The stars burst around Staravia. The gust of chill air that follows the explosions reaches to the ground.

As soon as Staravia recovers his balance, he veers around and pulls his wings in to stoop. Ash's command pulls him hastily out of the dive, leaving him stranded in a hover, chattering with feeling at something hidden behind Palkia.

Piplup hurries to join the commotion, vanishing from sight once he circles around Palkia's feet. Ash tears his attention away from his pokémon, looking to Dawn for an answer. "That was the pokémon from the square," she says, raising her voice over Staravia's outrage. If the explosions just now didn't get Palkia to wake up, then Dawn not even yelling isn't likely to finish the job.

"Why did it – ?" Ash waves at the tiny snowflakes still glimmering in the air.

"It doesn't know how to talk, so it just fights instead, I think." That's the consensus the trainers who fought it came together with – though maybe that's a stretch to claim. Dawn corrects herself: it's the consensus the older trainers came together with, and one girl Dawn's age who petted her staravia the whole while and didn't look up from its head when she spoke. Dawn nodded along because their conclusion made sense, but she couldn't follow the path they took to reach it.

Ash frowns just the way Brock did when they discussed it, expression trapped between discomfort and concern. "Oh, no, I hate that."

"What?"

"There's something horrible that people can do," he says, and then he stops, breathes in and looks Staravia's way. "I'll explain it later. Or Brock will, he'll be better actually." Back to Dawn now, his expression suddenly, inexplicably guilty: "I have to – Pikachu is – "

She pushes his shoulder. "Go. I'll figure out what it wants, you don't need to stick around." She's worried too – how hurt is _hurt_? – but someone needs to stay here, and she couldn't keep up with Ash anyway.

Ash nods, already turning. "Staravia, stay with Dawn!" he shouts, and then he's running as if he's never felt exhausted in his life.

Darkrai crosses its arms and watch him leave out of the corner of its eye. It's a weird situation, Dawn thinks. Between Darkrai and the strange pokémon, there's one she _knows_ she can trust, but that's also the one she has to talk to right now so she can make sure it won't hurt somebody.

She finds it with Piplup trying to fuss over it and Staravia hovering in front of it with narrowed eyes. It's caked in grey dust except for a few rather large splatters of Palkia's blood. Its left sleeve is shredded, but Dawn can't even see what it looks like underneath because its arm is _covered_ in its own drying blood.

It must have stayed at street level, where Dawn and Ash couldn't see it on the way over, but it obviously tried to fight Palkia too, and came off badly for it.

"You didn't have to do that," Dawn says, meaning the attack on Staravia. The pokémon doesn't understand, but there are still a lot of things that talking is useful for even after the words have lost meaning.

The pokémon tilts its head her way at her voice and subtly edges away from Piplup, who notices immediately and sets its flippers on its hips. Dawn's starter somehow actually enjoyed the fight back at the square and has wanted to make friends with its former opponent for a while now, since making friends is the best way to get a rematch, but the wild pokémon's shyness and giant ghost dragon protector have been handily foiling Piplup's plots.

Dawn swings her bag over her shoulder and finds one of the potions she keeps inside. It's not meant for anything much worse than a surface injury, but it should at least help with any pain and quicken the healing process.

The pokémon obviously wants something – it never followed up on its attack once it'd gotten their attention – but whatever that is can wait another thirty seconds. Hopefully. (Palkia is _right there_.) "Can I see your arm?" she asks, gesturing.

It doesn't react.

"Okay, that won't work." Dawn holds up her hand and sprays a scattering of potion onto her own palm instead.

The pokémon's heel scuffs backwards as soon as she presses down on the lever, and Dawn frowns and holds still. It might not know what a spray bottle is. "Piplup," she calls. She winces as she crouches down to meet her starter. She really wants to just sit on a bench for a few hours, but since that's not going to happen she'd really appreciate it if her thighs stopped whining about it.

She takes Piplup's left flipper and squirts a mist across the feathers. "See? It's fine," she says up to the other pokémon.

Staravia finally lands, the bird's feathers still ruffled and his expression still unhappy, but the wild pokémon doesn't back away. Progress! "And now the hard part," Dawn mutters. With way too much effort she manages to stand most of the way. She falters at the end, but before she has a chance to recover a gloved hand grabs her arm. "Thank you," she says on pure reflex.

The pokémon retreats the instant Dawn's steady on her feet again. Its hand stays raised partway as if it doesn't know what to do with it. Dawn holds the potion out to it. "Here – " she begins, but she breaks off as she realizes that she's not entirely sure if she means for it to come closer so she can have a look at its arm or if she means for it to take the potion itself.

This is a lot harder than she'd thought it would be.

It's also an interaction she would really prefer to be having in any place that isn't right next to Palkia.

Thirty seconds, she thought earlier. She's not a liar.

She does something rash then. Is making sudden movements around a skittish wild pokémon a very bad idea? Yes. Is it a worse idea than leaving one injured near Palkia? No, it's definitely not. "Piplup, Staravia, watch my back," she says, trying for gentle, and grabs the pokémon's hand.

Her grip is too tight – she fully expects to have to stop it from pulling away (though she doesn't have any contingency for if it ghosts) and is surprised when it doesn't even flinch. It lets her apply the potion, and when she lets go it brushes a finger again the already-sealing skin and brings it up to its mask.

Dawn considers calling Darkrai down too. But... does she really want to heal it when it's going to keep fighting if Palkia gets up? It's probably not far from its fainting threshold. She shouldn't change that.

"So what did you attack us for?" Dawn muses. She waves to get the pokémon's attention, then points out where its stars connected with Staravia. No response. "Hey, Staravia, can you go over there for a second? To where it attacked you?"

The pokémon turns its head to track the bird. There's a definite reaction as Staravia settles into a hover, but Dawn can't call tensing up an answer.

Suddenly, moving together, Darkrai flinches as if from a blow – for a bare instant its silhouette breaks apart into something thin and warped – while the pokémon on the ground bursts into motion towards the still-unconscious Palkia. Like a weird mammalian dragon claw, shaggy fur overtakes its uninjured arm. The talons its fingers become hit the pearl in Palkia's shoulder, but they skitter harmlessly across without leaving a scratch.

It backs hurriedly away, fur retracting, and now _–_ and _now_ Palkia stirs.

Here's what Dawn knows: Palkia can't be talked down from a fight, certainly nobody present (except maybe, _maybe_ Darkrai) can _beat_ it in a fight, Dawn has no way to make it stop fighting, and Dawn needs to make it stop fighting.

It's after Darkrai. If Darkrai isn't in Alamos, then –

But the thought doesn't make it any further, because that's when the pokémon kicks her feet out from under her, scoops her up before she can do more than yelp, and books it. "Wait wait wait – _Piplup_!" She flails against its hold as it jumps over the ice beam Piplup aims at its legs, because she's seen it do this before, she's _definitely_ seen this before, wow is it uncomfortable being on the receiving end of it, and then the pokémon has the gall to just up and toss her. She just has time to see her landing spot – a pane of glass on the ground that used to belong to a large mirror – before she falls _through_ it.

She hits the ground in a different dimension. She's on her feet in an instant, exhaustion lost to the wind, but the portal's already snapping closed. She gapes, heart thudding.

The doorway opens again. She leaps for it and crashes straight into a diving Staravia, whose momentum sends them both sprawling on the wrong side of the mirror.

She sits up as Staravia flutters off of her. "Piplup!"

Something's changed about this place. The strange views in the distance are darker than they were, as if the air in the stretches between them has gone murky. There's a vibration thrumming through the floating island that travels into her bones. Dawn knows it's not only her because Staravia is shifting on his feet too, wary.

And all of the doorways that stood open to Alamos are gone. The only portal remaining leads to the lake.

The ghost dragon hovers by the walkway with a half dozen of its window bubbles arrayed around it, each showing a different angle of Palkia clipping its friend with a water blast. The attack throws the pokémon clean off its feet – it lands well, quickly rolling back upright even with its shoulder newly dislocated, but then somehow Palkia's on top of it and it doesn't manage to avoid the next blow either. The god all but swats it aside.

This time it doesn't get up so easily. Or at all. While Darkrai catches Palkia's attention with a dark pulse, it pushes itself shakily to one knee, tries to go further and abruptly stops. Carefully, carefully it settles back down.

The tremors under Dawn grow stronger. She jolts with the realization that they're coming from the ghost dragon, who's growling, very, very loudly, at a frequency so low she can just barely hear it when she focuses.

She doesn't know how powerful this ghost is, but there's not really such a thing as a weak adult dragon. It's bigger than Palkia, too. It might be able to at least slow the god down. But it's still not making any move to interfere. Can it not make portals big enough for itself to fit through? Maybe it thinks Palkia is so much stronger than it that involving itself isn't worth the effort?

Trinity's sight, but she _really_ hopes that's not why.

"Hey! _Hey_!" she shouts. Luminous red eyes turn her way. "Can't you do something?"

A bubble shimmers into being in front of her. She gets a slightly slanted view of Piplup firing a bubble beam at the literal god who in two strikes brought down the pokémon Piplup could barely touch. Thankfully, Palkia doesn't retaliate. It doesn't actually seem to notice at all. Dawn claps herself on the back for her foresight in completely failing to teach her starter anything about elemental resistances. Ignorance has never paid off more.

She's relieved that Piplup's keeping out of trouble (even if it's not at all for lack of trying), but that's also not what she was asking.

She bites her lip. Okay. Okay.

Maybe this isn't all a bad thing. She's shut out of the physical town, but she has clear access to its people again. Someone has to know what to do. She reaches out to stroke Staravia's feathers. "Go and find Brock," she tells him, and with a sharp nod he shoots off for the lake.


End file.
